UN PEU AVANT MINUIT_In Nicolas Pariser’s film the piano takes center stage. Benjamin Esdraffo, Pariser’s long-time composer, wrote film criticism for Trafic and Cahiers du Cinéma in his younger years. He knows full well that in a film constantly parsing male-female dynamics and casually offering at least three definitions of “love,” the score must serve as a frame of rarefied emotion, punctuating Melvil Poupaud’s encounters with his daughter, newly met women, and the ghosts of his own youth.
At fifty, he belongs squarely to Generation X; in his prime, he launched cultural magazines that made him feel like the center of the world, coveted by women—especially the editorial interns. The film portrays a slow journey through the night, driven by the protagonist’s urge to make sense of the man he was thirty years earlier: the missteps, the objective faults, beyond the blanket accusations of inadequacy his old female friends keep throwing his way.
At one point, Maurice Ravel’s famous String Quartet in F major enters the fold, renowned for the recurring motifs of its opening movement echoing across the entire piece. Much like the ghosts haunting the protagonist through the Parisian night, at the hour of his existential reckoning.
On the eve of separating from his partner, with whom he lives in Nancy, 49-year-old Léo learns of the death of the biological father he never knew. While waiting to travel to Italy to settle the inheritance, he returns to Paris for a few days, the city of his youth. Conversat...
Adapted from Antonio Franchini’s memoir-novel of the same name, the film brings to the screen Angela, the author’s mother, an excessive, caustic and ferocious figure. Her son Antonio has built a family and career in Milan, far from her, but her arrival for Christmas reopen...
IL FUOCO CHE TI PORTI DENTRO_Particularly compelling here is La Niña, the Neapolitan musician who merges the millenary tradition of her city with a deeply percussive, barbaric, and minimalist approach. The score alternates tribal, odd-meter rhythms with the hypnotic sequences of a possessed piano that makes zero concessions to melody.
This dual sonic approach mirrors the film’s nature to perfection—essentially a chamber piece shot entirely inside a Milanese apartment, where one of the many manifestations of the Great Mediterranean Mother, the outstanding Vanessa Scalera, plays a Southern matriarch tyrannizing her children and seducing guests in a blind impulse for control and center stage.
