Screening at Venice: Nicolas Pariser’s ‘One Minute to Midnight’

A film of unassuming vigor, Nicolas Pariser’s Venice competition entry Un peu avant minuit (One Minute to Midnight) finds 49-year-old former writer Léo (Melvil Poupaud) on the precipice of personal and social change. The French drama is, for all intents and purposes, a post-#MeToo scholarly address that’s almost entirely about a man—not to mention, written and directed by one—but its self-reflexivity reveals a riveting feminist tome about the winds of cultural change, and the difficulty of de-centering yourself from your own story.

Thorny and casual in equal measure, the film finds Léo (a resident of Nancy, in eastern France) back in Paris for a week en route to Italy, where he’s scheduled to meet with a lawyer about an inheritance from his recently deceased father, a man he never knew. Separated from his current partner, and trying to get to know his estranged Parisian daughter—19-year-old Emma (Clara Pacini), a fiery activist—the former arts critic ends up on an ostensible tour of his past, reconnecting with old friends and colleagues, whose own retrospectives force him to see the world through brand-new eyes.

The movie’s many walk-and-talks extend for lengthy periods and in single takes. During these carefully crafted tracking shots, Poupaud creates a withheld mystery regarding the kind of man Léo truly is—a question other characters find themselves asking of him too, as he reflects on his life thus far. However, when strolling with several supporting players (especially the women who enter and re-enter his life), Léo finds himself on the receiving end of diatribes about how the world used to work, stemming from contemporary reckonings with patriarchal structures and expectations. Some decry the actions of other men. Others hold Léo to account for slights seemingly invisible to him, more minor violations that might once have lived in gray areas, but which are now better illuminated.

However, these cutting monologues—courtesy of his daughter, his former intern-turned-politician Armelle (Anaïs Demoustier), and the distant wife of an old friend, Éléonore (Léonie Simaga), with whom he shares romantic tension—are just as revealing about him as they are about each woman, and the changing state of things. That these characters feel comfortable enough to express themselves and partially dress Léo down (without him really biting back) speaks to a relatively evolved man willing to understand. However, One Minute to Midnight is about much more than listening quietly and receiving a pat on the back.

The aforementioned chats tend to revolve around how love and relationships used to work when the characters were younger, and about the shifting boundaries of not just acceptability, but accountability. Was there, for instance, a power imbalance when Léo engaged his former intern in an affair? How does this decades-old relationship sit with her today? And would it be fair for him to impose this question onto her—even with the best, most apologetic intentions? As the rules of romantic and sexual engagement are rewritten and clarified, there exists no guidebook for how to confront regret, or deal with metamorphosis.

The film is by no means a love story, but it’s about numerous love stories situated in the past—including that of Léo’s mother and his biological father—whose effects still linger, leaving those involved to ruminate on whether the world has truly changed, or whether their feelings were illusory. Once Léo tracks down various women, in a successive chain of amends and inquiry, the movie’s conversational complexity comes to light. Refrains along the lines of “those were just the standards back then” now quietly suggest a corollary: “Whose standards, exactly?”

As social revolution brews in the background, the death of Léo’s father leads to a reflection on mortality (not to mention, on being cut off from an entire culture and heritage). The collective pressure on Léo’s sense of self builds gradually, causing fissures to form across Poupaud’s careful façade. These are exacerbated further when Léo convenes with and learns about his old male colleagues—one of whom, he’s told, is an accused rapist, an early revelation that catalyzes his need to revisit the past.

Another friend is notably a TV writer producing a show about their younger days as critics, in which Léo’s fictitious stand-in is a major character. When Léo visits the set, his weeklong retrospective on his uneasy past—as seen through other people’s prisms—becomes hilariously literal. Are there things Léo missed about his friends, and about himself? Perhaps, though there’s no major mystery to be solved, other than what to do with the weight of this knowledge going forward.

As he searches for one last piece to the puzzle of youth—a woman he once loved, his former coworker Tina (Golshifteh Farahani)—the multitudinous input from women in his life reorients not just his sense of self, but his sense of objective. It’s a wonderfully impactful subversion of catharsis as a cinematic end goal, given the widespread context of female characters burdened with being outlets for men’s dreams and realizations.

All the while, Pariser maintains a keen balance between form and fluidity. He presents a dramatic narrative that plays out with robust confidence, but threatens to derail Léo’s already-shaky peace of mind. Scenes of people simply chatting, when imbued with motion, become wildly exciting here, as the characters’ intellectual gears start to rotate and enormous change foments in the movie’s backdrop, forcing us to question whether Léo might be missing the forest for the trees.

And yet, Léo’s own journey is no less important or affecting, as a man in flux, searching for a way to ground himself when everyone else seems to stand firm on what they believe, and how they see the world. The only question is what shape the next phase of his life will take, and who will end up a vital part of the rest of his journey—willingly, or otherwise.

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