“I’ve got to start something,” Nino, the eponymous protagonist of Pauline Loquès’ feature debut, announces early in the film to his mother at the kitchen table. It’s a Friday afternoon, and barely hours have passed since Nino learned about the diagnosis that will drastically alter his life. Not that you’d be able to tell from his face, a face as impenetrable as they come, belonging to up-and-coming Québécois actor Théodore Pellerin. If you remember that uncomfortable scene in a New York subway station in Eliza Hittman’s Sundance breakthrough Never Rarely Sometimes Always, it might, to no small effect, be due to Pellerin’s discomforting performance — though things have ultimately gained traction through a remarkably different, yet similarly engrossing, lead role as sycophantic videographer in Alex Russell’s Lurker, which played at both Sundance and Berlin earlier this year. While collaborating with any one of these young filmmakers could be shrugged off as mere happenstance, Pellerin’s standout performance in Pauline Loquès’ tender slice-of-life dramedy Nino (which won the actor a “Rising Star Award” at this year’s Cannes Critics Week) proves a trend.
Back at the kitchen table, Nino’s mother, irrespective of the reticence in her son’s carefully selected words — “I’ve got to start something” — seems less concerned with the nature of this embarkation than excited at the prospect of any change at all. If there is more to her impromptu exclamation — “Great!” — it’s no doubt relief, which not only plays to offbeat comedic effect, but also reveals an underlying truth about Loquès’ sedulously observed protagonist.
The film is hardly past its opening, yet Nino already seems so well introduced as a character that seeing him falter after a brief surge of courage feels inevitable. Realizing that he maneuvered himself into a dead end, that this filial kitchen talk doesn’t hold the kind of comfort he is grasping for, he fends off his mother’s feeble attempts at inquiring into his condition, resorting to an answer both delicate and vague: depression. It speaks to the maturity of Loquès’ direction that she allows the moment to take on complexity without sentimental overcharge: there is Nino’s inner resistance against confiding, his spontaneous deflection from the actual disease, and his mother’s hilariously inept attempt to respond to the invented one. And as fun as it might be to watch her, somewhat reluctantly, follow the dictum of excessive sensitivity in the face of depression, as the film, set over a mere weekend, unravels, you may start to wonder whether there might not be an emotional truth to it.
There is a more thoroughly articulated joke on the state of the French medical system in the opening scene, when it turns out that no one ever informed Nino that he’s caught a Papillomavirus infection, a widespread yet under-discussed sexually transmitted disease. Nor did anyone tell him that the same infection has triggered throat cancer, with his first chemotherapy session already scheduled for Monday. But Loquès uses these systemic jumbles rather as a backdrop to the confused mind than as an excuse for low-hanging jokes. Which is all the more striking considering that humor, despite the overall melancholic tone, is crucial to Loquès’ project, and it speaks to her directorial confidence that she hinges it much more on fleeting glimpses than strident punchlines.
In undergoing treatment, Nino will also lose his fertility, which renders Monday not only an ominous beginning, but also an endpoint. (Barely time enough to produce some last potent sperm, to be preserved in case he ever decides to become a father.) Amidst all this, Nino, after a long day, quasi-stumbles into his own surprise birthday party, a moment well built up through our close proximity to his perspective and an awkward encounter with one of the party guests (whom, fittingly, he’s never met before). Every now and then, however, this privileged perspective of ours is questioned by slowly panning wide shots, in the course of which we, recurringly, lose sight of Nino through urban obstructions such as bridges and walls.
These spatial separations remind us that some situations Nino must navigate alone — stripped even of our lenticular company. Though if with us, the native Parisian often blurs all too well into the city’s washed-out monochrome. Which makes what less confident directors might frame as some grandiose reveal — that Nino is very successful at his job, and in fact the superior of many of the guests at his surprise birthday party — another plausible facet to his character.
Toned down to a degree that allows any given moment to swing one way or the other, Nino — the film — oscillates between nostalgia, subtle humor, and, despite everything, intrepidity toward the future. The exquisite and in many ways central party scene encapsulates this restless sway, with Nino and his friends propelling us back into the aughts as they roar to Foals’ “Cassius,” before we see the birthday boy in talks with his friend and roommate Sofian (William Lebghil), who eagerly dispenses his podcast-born philosophies — “The secret is to start!” — and later see him bathroom-locked-in with a woman who, not unlike him, injects hormones for Oocyte cryopreservation. In other words: to freeze her eggs.
Now at 29, Nino has not only outgrown most of British post-punk revival bands of the 2000s, but also the sweaters of his adolescence, one of which — exposing his belly button — we see him absentmindedly put on as he rummages through the relics of his teenage years. With Monday lining up as a preliminary finish line, the remaining weekend seems suddenly to have opened up, holding in store a wealth of chance encounters, as if to reward his dedicated roaming. One of them sees him reunite with a former classmate, who remembers him as the boy who did not take time off from school when his father died, but, against all predictions by the teacher, showed up right the next day in class. Which suggests that if there is sadness in Nino’s life, it might be caused by its absence. And while conscious of the fact that a fundamental shift of this paradigm would betray the pursued realism of her debut, Pauline Loquès insists that any moment inheres the possibility of a new beginning — especially when all we can see is an end.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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