If you thought a film following a man’s weekend after discovering he’s ill couldn’t be charming, funny, tender, warm and thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end, journalist turned filmmaker Pauline Loquès will change your mind. And your hearts, forever.
I sat down to watch a pre-Cannes screening of Pauline Loquès’ Nino as I typically like to do: clueless and info-less. Sometimes, well actually most times, reading about a film beforehand ruins the experience, particularly at festivals. If I’m going to watch a movie as an audience member, I’ll catch a review of it on the NY Times or the Guardian, but as a journalist, a cold watch is always best.
This time, the technique proved downright magical, as the premise of the film could appear like the synopsis for a downer. When the film begins, we find ourselves sitting in the room with a young man, Nino, played phenomenally by Canadian TV and film actor Théodore Pellerin, who is being told he has a scary illness. As he gently argues in disbelief that it couldn’t possibly be him, they must have someone else’s chart and the diagnosis is wrong, the doctor assign to him two crucial tasks, missions if you like, that will need to be completed before his treatment begins, in three days. It’s a Friday, as the film clearly indicates and by Monday, Nino has to begin treatment because his young age, combined with the aggressiveness of the illness, make him a “priority case.”
So off Nino goes, first to a fertility clinic, you’ll have to watch to find out why or maybe you already know, and then to his mom’s house, played by Jeanne Balibar. Because on top of having had such disastrous news, he also can’t find the keys to his apartment. Everything seems to work against Nino, and yet his demeanor remains easygoing and kind, never does he raise his voice or lose it, he is vulnerable and charming, yet we understand, completely lost. That’s how we end up bonding with this man, whose story we have just begun to watch and who is interpreted by an actor who possesses so much — charm, good looks and charisma to sell.
It is difficult for Nino, as it would be for any of us I imagine, to admit he has the big “C” and so he tells his mom he’s depressed instead. She treats him to a dinner, because I’ve omitted one key thing so far, it is also Nino’s birthday. What an awful way to celebrate it right? Well, read on, because Nino, as a film, is an ode to friendship, to the power we have to make our friends’ lives better by being in them and the kind of circle we can create around us if only we dispense a bit of kindness instead of jealousy, selfishness and greed.
In a short interview on the Critics’ Week website — Nino is part of their glorious line up this year — Loquès explained the ploy of the lost keys, which allows us to follow Nino around a strange, ever changing Paris. “If he could have, I think Nino would have spent those three days alone, under the covers…” the filmmaker said “locked out of his flat, he is forced to wander through the city where he cannot be alone. Wherever he goes, there will always be someone a few meters away - for better or for worse.”
We follow Nino around and share his inner confusion. He wants to tell someone what he found out in the doctor’s office and yet, when he tries, those he tells reply with the usual sentences, the commonplace phrases that make him feel worse, not better. I imagine that when you’re told something so crucial, no one can say the right thing — they can only try to put themselves in your shoes.
In the ending scene of the film, the importance of friendship is explained and though the film may or may not give us the answer to the question “will Nino make it? Will he be cured?” it really doesn’t matter. He’s loved, by us, by those around him, and that’s all that matters.
Nino is the kind of character who, once the film is over — this is a short 85 minutes cinematic wonder — one wishes one knew, in real life, up close and personal, just so we could go on sharing all his adventures with him — even the ones that include a treatment room, or being left out of one’s own apartment.
In a public bath, which Nino uses to wash up when he still can’t get into his apartment before his scheduled treatment, he meets up with a curious man, played by Mathieu Amalric. As the man pats his own aftershave onto Nino’s face, a moment of hope appears and never leaves us again, because the film, the character of Nino himself were born out of the necessity to reinvent reality. Amalric is just one of those angels we all encounter in our lives, and sometimes don’t realize that magic has touched us.
“A few years ago, I lost a loved one, a young man taken by cancer,” Loquès explains in her director’s statement. “Devastated by sadness and anger, I turned to writing to reclaim hope. I needed to reinvent the story, to save a character. Nino came to me suddenly, like love at first sight on a street corner.”
And for us watching the film, it is also love at first sight, for this quiet masterpiece of a movie, and this unusual hero we discover in Nino, a man who can conquer a thousand hearts with one small move, a look, and the idea of survival despite all odds.
Written and directed by Loquès, Nino also features stellar performances by William Lebghil and Salomé Dewaels, was shot with intimate precision by Lucie Baudinaud and is being sold by The Film Party Sales.
Image courtesy of the Festival de Cannes, used with permission.