Alex Heeney reviews Pauline Loquès’s film, Nino, starring Théodore Pellerin, which screens in the Critics’ Week sidebar at Cannes. The film tells the story of a twentysomething man’s nervewrecking weekend after he’s diagnosed with cancer and before he starts treatment.
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Pauline Loquès’s heartrending feature debut, Nino, beautifully and viscerally captures that strange limbo you enter when you get a serious medical diagnosis, like treatable cancer. You’re not dying, but you’re not healthy either. Suddenly, there’s the way the rest of the world operates and where you suddenly live. Other people can fix their fatigue with meditation. Other people see fertility clinics as a route to parenthood rather than an insurance policy for imminent sterility. Worse, you feel alienated because you can’t just tell people that you’re no longer like them. It’s like you’re carrying around a big, heavy secret, and you’re not sure who you can trust to carry it with you.
When we meet Nino Calvert (the brilliant Théodore Pellerin), he’s spelling out his surname for a hospital admin so he can collect his test results on a Friday afternoon. She can’t hear him, and her phone keeps ringing to interrupt them. It’s the beginning of a Kafkaesque journey – traversing hallways, filling out forms, waiting in rooms, always three steps behind the hospital staff – for what he assumes is a routine appointment but ends up more serious. Over the next 1h40 minutes, we follow Nino from Friday to Monday, in the interregnum between finding out he has cancer and beginning treatment. His two-syllable name feels like a direct nod to Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, in which Cléo waits in real time for a diagnosis rather than for her treatment.
Pauline Loquès’s Nino finds a thoughtful cinematic language for Nino’s alienation (our review)
From the beginning, Loquès finds a thoughtful cinematic language for Nino’s alienation. His doctor delivers his diagnosis while the banging of construction workers outside keeps interrupting Nino’s (and our) focus, because he can’t quite believe or understand what he’s hearing. Walking through Paris afterward, the camera high above captures the crowd moving almost entirely in the opposite direction from Nino, because that’s how Nino feels emotionally. When he goes home, he realizes he’s lost his keys while his landlord is notably absent, meaning he spends the weekend effectively homeless while feeling emotionally unmoored.
Essentially, he has two tasks. First, find a way to freeze his sperm, even though once he does ejaculate into a cup, he’ll only have one hour to get the sperm to the hospital. Second, find someone to accompany him to his first treatment on Monday. As he heads home from the hospital, he almost leaves two voicemails for someone about it, but gives up. We never find out who he’s calling. It could be his mother (Jeanne Balibar), whom he visits in the suburbs that evening to celebrate his birthday. Or it could be one of his friends. He struggles just as much to drop the bomb in person with both, whether because saying it makes it real and he’s not ready for that, or because the people around him are too self-absorbed, or he’s worried they might be.
His first attempt to unload his troubles is with his mother that evening. It’s his birthday, and he visits her in the suburbs to celebrate. When she lights 29 candles on the cake, it feels like it’s a performance to prove her own good mothering rather than something he wants. (“Why are you lighting them?” he asks.) But before he can even get out that he has a health problem, she interrupts him, making it about her, until he gives up. He tells her he has depression, which isn’t exactly a lie, but not the whole truth. When you lie to loved ones about important things, even self-absorbed loved ones, you suddenly have to lie about a lot of things. He finds himself inventing all sorts of context because he can’t bear to share the truth and be met with the same indifferent or self-absorbed reaction.
Waiting for treatment also triggers an existential crisis. Faced with the possibility of never becoming a parent, Nino runs into a childhood classmate, Lina (Estelle Meyer), on Friday, who is already one. By Sunday, it seems like she might be the only one with whom he can share what he’s going through because they’re almost strangers now. He goes on another trip down memory lane with the ex-girlfriend (Camille Rutherford of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life) whom he suspects gave him HPV, which caused his cancer. She’s in the process of not only vacating her apartment but also the country. He means to leave her a note that she should see a doctor, but ends up having a drink where he avoids the subject entirely. She’s yet another reminder of how other people are looking to the future, while he can barely handle the looming ordeal on Monday.
Considering how packed this weekend is with encounters that force Nino to examine his life and his future, Loquès has a surprisingly light touch. It doesn’t feel too much that it’s also Nino’s birthday. Even the fact that the sound of Lina’s son is what interrupts his attempt to collect sperm doesn’t feel heavy-handed. Loquès’s screenplay quietly sets up a series of encounters that always feel believable and motivated while also arising at the exact right time emotionally, a tricky balancing act.
It feels right that Nino also can’t get into his apartment because his landlord is literally absent, while his friends and family are merely emotionally absent. It’s not that his friends are callous so much as that they’re young; they’re worrying about hooking up and partying. He can’t imagine burdening his bestie, Sofian (William Lebghil), with what’s going on. How do you even broach the subject of your impending chemo when you haven’t even revealed your diagnosis? And your friend is talking about how to make him look good in front of the woman he’s courting? For Nino (and us), it feels like Sofian is on another planet, even though we have no real reason to believe he won’t come through.
Throughout the film, Loquès effectively puts us in Nino’s headspace, often through sound design that distances Nino from the people around him. But it’s also in the way the camera pulls back from a conversation that’s not going well to a wide two-shot where we feel as distant from the interaction as he does. Or how his mother crawls into bed with him, and a tight two-shot is the loneliest thing in the world because she’s oblivious to what he’s going through. Or the tension in the space between Nino and Lina on a bed when they cross the divide to hold hands.
Pellerin’s performance could make or break the film, and he carries it. The Québécois actor (a longtime Seventh Row favourite) who gave one of the best performances of the decade in Philippe Lesage’s Genèse (2018) has been working more and more in France lately. (He also starred in my 2022 Cannes favourite Continental Drift, which still hasn’t been released in North America). He does excellent work in Nino, in a way that’s only possible because Loquès lets his performance breathe. She gives us time to watch him process things, think, shake things off, and put up armour to conceal his true feelings. Pellerin is a very physical performer: the way he stiffens when Nino realizes he can’t talk openly with his mother, or melts in the face of Lina’s openness.
A uniformly excellent cast supports Pellerin. As his ex-girlfriend, Rutherford is full of detached affection, uncertain how to behave after years apart but warm nonetheless. As Lina, Meyer radiates warmth and wisdom but uncertainty, too. She’s figuring out how to be a mom and a grownup as she goes along, and she can extend her warmth to Nino when he needs it most. He returns the favour, both to Lina and her son. Lebghil, likewise, walks the difficult line of being both loving and carefree, to the point that we aren’t totally sure either if he’ll show up for Nino the way he needs him to — even though we know he loves him. As the oncologist, Victoire du Bois strikes the perfect balance of intending to be empathetic but carelessly forgetting that what is routine for her – giving a diagnosis and outlining a treatment plan – isn’t for her patient.
Discover one film you didn’t know you needed
Not in the zeitgeist. Not pushed by streamers.
But still easy to find — and worth sitting with.
And a guide to help you do just that.
