Screening in Competition, Un peu avant minuit brings Nicolas Pariser into more intimate territory than his previous films. Politics remains present, but now filters through personal relationships, memory, and masculinity, as the film observes a man compelled to re-examine himself in the light of the feminist revolution and an increasingly unsettled present.
In your earlier films, politics was often front and center. Here, it seems to enter the characters’ private spheres instead. Is this an evolution of your political cinema?
What happened was that, at an age when my fellow director friends were making films on intimate, domestic, or romantic themes, I couldn’t secure funding for mine. The industry took an interest in my work when I began, somewhat by chance, writing scripts centered on the political world, and I pursued that path. In my first two features, I still tried to let the characters’ interiority surface, but political plots and discussions tended to take over. With Un peu avant minuit, I wanted to reverse that dynamic. The film is first and foremost about intimacy, with politics lingering in the background before crashing into the protagonist’s private life. I love works – whether films, novels, or paintings – that interlace grand History with individual lives. I try to place myself in that tradition, from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education to Dino Risi’s A Difficult Life.
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...
Léo is forced to question himself and his past relationships. Were you aiming to make a film that takes a clear stand, or rather to depict a gradual male awakening?
My aim is not to relativize, soften, or add footnotes to the #MeToo movement: coming from a man, that would be completely out of place. For a man, #MeToo is a healthy call to listen, remain quiet, and look inward. One of the film’s intentions is to show a man for whom stepping away from center stage is anything but effortless. Yet I wouldn’t call it a genuine awakening, because I don’t really believe in total, earnest conversions. Instead, I observe characters unsettled by the #MeToo revolution and the way it shatters certainties, feelings, and memories. It is a revolution that also forces us to re-read everything that came before it, stripping away our ability to tell ourselves stories. And Léo, in all likelihood, has told himself plenty.
A constant sense of danger hangs over the film. Is this also a way of capturing our current era, particularly how women navigate relationships with men today?
The danger – or rather, the anxiety – stems from the feeling of living through the twilight of a world that hasn’t fully collapsed yet. Democracy still exists in France, but the political system feels irreversibly broken. Paris still looks like Paris, but it would be disingenuous to film it without the riot police vans and the lines of officers trying to “keep order” almost every weekend. That is the danger I wanted to convey: something is vanishing, and we have no idea what lies ahead. The feminist revolution is taking place inside this reality. It is one of the few sources of hope in our time, and precisely for that reason, the paradox of such profound progress emerging against an almost apocalyptic backdrop is striking.
The film also addresses forms of violence that in the past were tolerated or simply left unnamed. How well can we truly recognize patterns of violence and dominance while immersed in the present?
Every era likely generates its own specific modes of domination, but male dominance in the intimate sphere seems to have maintained remarkable continuity across history. Men have sexually assaulted women, while codes of silence and denial – especially within families – allowed that violence to persist. When Freud first began listening to women, he formulated an early theory positing that many psychological disorders stemmed from childhood sexual abuse. He soon realized that, taking his patients’ testimonies at face value, the sheer scale of rapes and abusers would have been immense even among Viennese high society, including his own circle – and he quickly abandoned the theory. The power of today’s unburdening of women’s voices lies right here: it confronts an issue almost as ancient as the family unit itself. I feel very close to contemporary progressive movements, but I remain wary of their triumphant rhetoric. A just cause, even when articulated with clarity and force, is not guaranteed to win.
