The Man Who Snubbed Women: Pariser Performs a Patriarchal Audit
There’s something that feels a bit ‘too little, too late’ in Nicolas Pariser’s latest film Un peu avant minuit (One Minute to Midnight), reuniting him with Melvil Poupaud, the star of his 2015 thriller Le Grand Jeu (in which the actor also portrays a man struggling with the sunset of his prime). A somewhat standard, arguably inconsequential man finds himself reappraising his relationships with women and the folly of his obliviousness with how he treated them, which often feels a bit trivial for anyone with a more well honed sense of self-awareness or actualization. Still, its blatant messaging is effective, even if Poupaud’s amiability makes him seem like a sacrificial lamb whose future seems both unclear and rather uninteresting.
At yet another romantic crossroads in his life, forty-nine-year-old professor Leo (Poupaud) finds himself stuck in Paris for a week, forced to wait to travel to Italy for the reading of his father’s will, a man he has never met. Recently single, he connects with his activist daughter Emma (Clara Pacini, of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower, 2025), who has decided to forego her studies in the arts to pursue involvement with significant ongoing social unrest in the Parisian suburbs. Reconnecting with friends from his past, Leo is forced to swallow some bitter pills. Having once worked on a notable magazine with his classmates, he seeks out the successful Sebastian (Sam Chemoul), who now controls several major magazines and is in the process of making a television series out of the initial publication Leo also worked on. The outspoken Eleanore (Leonie Simaga, co-star of Pariser’s most well-traveled title, Alice and the Mayor, 2019) is one of several sources who informs Leo about the ongoing sexual assault charges brought against their friend and colleague Luc, which brings her to suggest Leo might not have been aware of how he’d also treated women from the past, challenging him to make amends. The first stop is with an ex-lover Armelie (Anaïs Demoustier, also reuniting with Pariser from Alice), who had worked as an intern on Leo’s first magazine.
Armelie has become a notable public figure in the decades since they’d met, far surpassing the trajectory of Leo. While she holds no resentment towards him, it’s clear their relationship was dictated by normalized gender roles at the time, where men were gatekeepers, oblivious to their power. Eventually, Leo is led to Tina (Golshifteh Farahani), a significant romantic interest from that period in his life, though she’s even less interested in exonerating him. Finally, darling Leo makes it to Italy, where he meets his half-sister Giulia (Chiara Mastroianni) for the first time (and suggests an inadvertent, strangely incestuous dynamic considering Mastroianni and Poupaud played a married couple in A Christmas Tale, 2008). There, he connects the dots between the gendered perspectives of his father and mother, both who had opposing viewpoints of what their actual connection meant for one another.
There’s a Dickensian element to Un peu avant minuit as Leo is basically revisiting the ghosts of women/lovers’ past (Armelie, Tina, his mother), present (Giulia, Eleonore) and future (his daughter, Emma). Eleanore is perhaps the most interesting character, catalyzing Leo’s journey towards accountability and reconciliation while also carrying interesting conversations about how love has morphed into a lack of desire thanks to how sexuality has become more intertwined with legality. Ongoing political turmoil seems like a quaint afterthought (paling in comparison to something Quentin Dupiuex mounts in a strikingly comparable examination of father-daughter duo ignorant of similar turmoil in Full Phil, 2026).
Pariser’s approach to narrative often suggests his predecessor Claude Sautet (particularly with 1970’s The Things of Life), and this feels like a demure, contemporary approach to reconciling how historically, and until more recently, men have been able to treat women as disposable objects (one wonders how Sautet might have created an ensemble perspective examining something like the ‘pussy posse’ Leonardo DiCaprio era). Ultimately, there aren’t any real resolutions for Leo, except maybe he’s finally equipped with the tools to approach women with equanimity instead of fantasies eventually revered only in the mind’s eye as romantic, nostalgic figures.
Reviewed on September 10th at the 2026 Venice Film Festival (83rd edition) – In Competition. 117 Minutes.
★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
