THÉODORE PELLERIN IN NINO

PAULINE LOQUÈS: NINO (2025) - RENDEZ-VOUS WITH FRENCH CINEMA 2025

Drastic realignment

TRAILER

Young Québecois actor Théodore Pellerin won the Critics’ Week Rising Star Award for his "soulful" lead performance as 29-year-old Parisian Nino Clavel in Pauline Loques’ debut feature after it premiered at Cannes 2025 Critics' Week. Linked by Le Monde's film critic, who called this a film "of striking depth and tenderness," to Buster Keaton, Pellerin is tall, deep-voiced, with an open, innocent face. The combined effect is of both strength and vulnerability. The film follows Nino doggedly over a long weekend starting Friday morning and ending Monday morning, beginning when he goes into a hospital and gets dire newss that leaveS him unmoored, swept into a Kafkaesque nihtmare.. The string of days and hours that follow are a meandering odyssey for Nino in which he is realigning to this new reality and ends when he reports back to the hospital to begin radical treatment. Thes events unfold with an economy, almost a casual offhand manner, that marks this as an starkly fresh approach to a familiar subject.

Through overcrowding or confusion at the hospital the young woman doctor who sees him (Victoire Du Bois, identified in the cast list as "The Oncologist") thinks he's already been given the news that he has throat cancer and begins matter-of-factly describing what's next for him. No time, then, to process this information that is, pun intended, very hard to swallow. Clanging noises outside in this scoreless film affirm that a world goes on that for Nino has frozen. THe oncologist is competent, yet almost bored. She shows him some imaging and explains has throat cancer caused by human papillomavirus (HPV) frm a sexually transmitted disease he had a long time ago. .Because of his youth,he will get priority and start treatment on . Assuming hhe wants to have children he needs to produce sperm and deliver it to be banked, and he gets a labeled tube.

Nino's apartment isn't very far away, but he will not get into it. He has lost his keys, apparently not for the first time, and the concierge ("Gardien") is out, and then when he's in, a disaster overwhelms the situation. Nino will sleep on the floor, then go to a flophouse where a well-meaning man in a sad, shabby suit played by Mathieu Amalric will help him shower and clean up.

There are three main people, his mother (played by iconic French actress Jeanne Balibar), a school classmate Zoe (Salome Dewaels) he doesn't remember who has a little boy, Solal (Balthazar Billaud) and his best friend Sofian (William Lebghil), who gives him a surprise birthday party. Yes, this is the weekend of Nino's birthday. He gets close to his mother, huddling close almost like a child. The party shows the withdrawn Nino isn't totally disconnected. His couch-surfing situation draws him to Zoe, and she helps him with the sperm sample. He also enjoys playing dad to Solal.

At first Nino can't see, tp tell anyone, later he does. As Allan Hunter puts it in his Screen Daily review, "Nino carries his cancer diagnosis alone, as if the very act of sharing his news would make it feel all the more real." This also defines the kind of person he is. He hints at a big change to his mother, but she misinterprets him, and thinks it may be he's transitioning. The first time he tells anyone flat out "I have cancer," it's suddenly and impulsively to two strangers who're about to walk out the door and not be seen again. But later Sofian provides warm, intense concern. He really is a best friend.

The lost keys provide a useful external correlative to Nino's total disruption. He has a bureaucratic job that's well handled through conflicting peripheral references. It's quite real, but not quite relevant now. It is a "shit job" in the eyes of a family member, yet it may be socially essential work. Coworkers absurdly sympathize with his vaguely referenced trouble, thinking he's a bit jaded and suggesting he will be okay if he just takes regular breaks from his computer.

Some of these things would be funny at least if the situation were not so grim; or maybe they are funny, anyway. Nino seems protective of his body with his mother, trying also to stop smoking, but on this weekend he does smoke and drink and get quite drunk at the birthday party and he laughs then. He delights at telling a bedtime story for little Solal. The boy probably needs a man in his life and Nino seems to click with him. He and Zoe are unable to make love but she finds a unique use for a baby telephone.

As Hunter points out, French precedents for this theme include Agnes Varda’s Cleo From 5 to 7 (1963), in which a young singer awaits test results, and Francois Ozon’s Time To Leave (2005) in which a young photographer faces terminal cancer. He notes that "Loquès also tips her hat to the cinema of Claude Sautet with her touching use of a photograph of Romy Schneider from his timeless The Things Of Life (1969)," a film in which a man lies by the road dead or dying after a car accident and thinks back over all the "choses de la vie" that are so sweet now.

It's nice that Loquès loves Sautet's warm humanistic cinema but this is a French film of a quieter, drier, later kind. We can appreciate the avoidance of melodrama or bathos but Nino can be frustrating to observe - you may just want to grab him and shake him - and the film is a very slow burn. Despite a lot of very specific details, at times it's almost as if the idea of the film is more powerful than its playing-out. I was reminded from the start of Joaquim Trier's French-inspired Norwegian film 2011 Oslo, Aug. 31 where Anders Danielsen Lie plays a man whose intense brief pathway through the hours is marked not by cancer but a persistent death wish. The structure is similar but the personality is more dynamic. Still, Loquès economical screenplay, co-scripted with Maud Ameline, has a lot going for it, and this isn't a screen experience that it's easy to get out of your head. Unlike Oslo, the end is a beginning and has hopefulness about it as the protagonist is shocked out of his numbness, the threat of death bringing him back to life.

Pellerin is a remarkably versatile actor who is wholly bilingual in French and English and has starred and appeared not only in other French films but also in American films and TV shows including Boy Erased, Lurker, and "On Being a God in Central Florida."

Nino, 96 mins., premiered at Cannes Critics' Week May 18, 2025, also showing at Toronto, Hamburg, Haifa, Warsaw, Rome, Valladolid, Göteborg and other international festivals. It opened in France Sept. 17, 2025. AlloCiné press rating 3.8=76%; spectators 3.9=78%). Screened for this review as part of Film at Lincoln Center's Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (Mar. 5-15, 2026). Showtimes:
Showtimes:
Sat, March 7, d9:30 PM Q&A
Thu, March 12, 1:00 PM


BALTHAZAR BILLAUD, THÉODORE PELLERIN IN NINO

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.