\n\tL\u00e9o (Melvil Poupaud), a former journalist turned untenured college professor, is not exactly what you\u2019d call a success story, although he\u2019s far from being a failure. Thoughtful, fairly seductive, still handsome despite some visible hair loss, the 49-year-old single dad seems to have led a relatively good life, so why does he seem so down on himself?<\/p>\n
\n\tThose who seek out French director Nicolas Pariser\u2019s latest feature shouldn\u2019t expect a definitive answer to that inquiry, or any answers at all, really. One Minute to Midnight (Un peu avant minuit) is very much a film about a guy asking lots of questions \u2014 both of himself and of the coterie of old friends and lovers he runs into during a brief stay in Paris \u2014 wondering aloud who he once was and who, for better or worse, he\u2019s become.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tOne Minute to Midnight\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n
\tHe’ll always have Paris.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Melvil Poupaud, Chiara Mastroianni, Ana\u00efs Demoustier, Golshifteh Farahani, L\u00e9onie Simaga, Clara Pacini, Micha Lescot
Director, screenwriter: Nicolas Pariser
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 51 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tCharming, melancholic and a tad too Parisian, the movie sometimes feels like an Eric Rohmer flick updated for an era of #MeToo reckoning and political upheaval, sprinkled with some Woody Allen-style urbanite humor. Partially inspired by the director\u2019s own backstory as a film critic for a fledgling culture mag, it gets a bit lost in its own navel-gazing but makes some worthy observations along the way, especially about how we each wind up viewing our collective past differently as the years go by.<\/p>\n
\n\tThat past haunts L\u00e9o throughout his week-long trip to the City of Lights, where he\u2019s waylaid before heading to Italy to deal with the death of his estranged and supposedly wealthy father. Shacking up in his deceased mother\u2019s Left Bank apartment, L\u00e9o arrives at a time when Paris indeed seems to be burning: Riot police are everywhere and the French president is threatening to declare martial law, although what caused all the chaos is never specified.<\/p>\n
\n\tPolitics were front-and-center in two of Pariser\u2019s previous features (The Great Game<\/a> and Alice and the Mayor<\/a>), but here they\u2019re merely a backdrop (albeit an omnipresent one) to show how disconnected L\u00e9o and his generation seem to be from current events. This is made crystal clear when the professor meets up with his teenage daughter, Emma (Clara Pacini), at the start of his trip, embarking on a long and rather expository walk-and-talk before Emma heads out to a street protest along with other young rebels.<\/p>\n \n\tComposed of several such conversation pieces that Pariser often captures in lengthy single takes, Midnight follows L\u00e9o\u2019s circuitous trajectory as he goes on to reconnect with some of the journalists he worked with back in the day, most of whom have moved on to other endeavors. Only the busy Fran\u00e7ois (Micha Lescot), who founded their first magazine over 20 years ago, remains knee-deep in the press world, running a small media empire while producing a TV series about the now defunct publication where L\u00e9o and the others all got their start.<\/p>\n