After I finished watching Nicolas Pariser’s One Minute to Midnight, one question popped into my head: what happens when a man reaches middle age and begins looking back at how he has treated women, loved them, misunderstood them, and perhaps taken certain things for granted? It is a subject worth exploring, especially at a time when conversations around relationships between men and women have changed considerably. The problem is that while Pariser gives his characters plenty to say about it, the film itself doesn’t always seem to know where it’s going.

Here, we have Léo, played by Melvil Poupaud, a 49-year-old man whose life has reached an uncomfortable point. His relationship is ending and, at almost the same time, he learns that his biological father, a man he never knew, has died. Before travelling to Italy to deal with the inheritance, Léo spends several days in Paris, meeting people from his past, talking to his politically engaged daughter and, little by little, reconsidering his relationships with women and the person he has been.

It sounds like the beginning of a story about change, but One Minute to Midnight does not show Léo’s dramatic transformation. The film depends on conversations and encounters, allowing one discussion to lead into another as Léo moves through Paris. There are moments when this works extremely well, specifically because the dialogue is one of the film’s strongest elements. The cast makes those conversations even better; Poupaud is superb as Léo, finding humour, insecurity and a certain self-absorption in a man who spends a great deal of time thinking about himself without necessarily understanding himself well. Having said that, there is something slightly lost about him throughout the film, as though he has suddenly realised that the world around him has moved forward while he was busy living according to rules he never thought very much about.

The women surrounding him are just as important, and Pariser has assembled an excellent cast including Chiara Mastroianni, Golshifteh Farahani, Léonie Simaga, Clara Pacini and Anaïs Demoustier. They each bring something different to their scenes with Léo, and some of the best moments come when the women make it clear that his problems are his own to deal with. And this is also where I struggled with the film.

Looking at changing attitudes towards women from the perspective of a middle-aged man could have been really interesting, but the film spends so much time with Léo questioning himself that, after a while, it begins to go in circles. The film seems to challenge men who make everything about themselves, yet Léo is still at the centre of almost every conversation. Sometimes this works, but at other times I wasn’t quite sure where his journey was supposed to take us.

Around Léo, Paris is going through its own troubles; younger people are angry, politically active and worried about where the country is heading, while Léo seems almost stuck in his own past, trying to understand his relationships and the man he has been. I actually liked this contrast, but I wish the film had done more with it. There is so much happening here – politics, masculinity, the death of his father, old relationships and his complicated bond with his daughter – and all of it could have made for a powerful story, but together it never quite comes into focus.

The loose structure is very much part of the way Pariser tells the story, and I can see what he is trying to do by letting Léo move from one conversation to another, with every person bringing something new for him to think about. But for me, it doesn’t always work; there are moments when the story simply drifts and I wanted it to give me something more to hold onto. The conversations themselves are often excellent, but strangely, I became far more interested in watching these actors talk than in where Léo’s story was actually going.

But good conversations do not automatically make a fully convincing narrative, and this is where One Minute to Midnight remained slightly out of reach for me. The screenplay has plenty of ideas about masculinity, ageing, politics, relationships and the way one generation responds to another, yet not all of those ideas find their place within the same film. Sometimes it seems as though Léo is examining his past, sometimes as though the film is examining his generation, and elsewhere the focus widens towards the political direction of contemporary France and Europe. There is value in all of those conversations, but the screenplay could have been tighter in bringing them together.

The film raises interesting questions about whether recognising your past behaviour actually means you have changed, yet Léo’s repeated questioning eventually becomes more interesting as an idea than as an emotional journey.

There is a better film somewhere inside One Minute to Midnight, and frustratingly, you occasionally catch sight of it. For all its thoughtful conversations and excellent performances, the narrative remains slightly unpolished, leaving some of its most interesting ideas hanging rather than allowing them to fully connect. It is an intelligent and well-acted film that I admired in parts, even if I never completely found my way into what it was trying to say.

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Written by Maggie Gogler

Featured image courtesy of Venice film Festival

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