Director – Laurent Micheli – 2025 – Belgium, France – 117m
****
A young man, his girlfriend and his two mates navigate an urban existence filled with crap jobs during the day and drug-fuelled partying during the night – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
This opens with a combination of slow, ominous music (which you might describe as a deep, absorbing blue) being undercut by frame grabbed moving images featuring green, yellow, red, and black – but not blue – of people partying, girls snorting coke and popping pills.
And then the voiceover, the potential sign that someone should be writing a novel or perhaps poetry rather than making a movie. “Paradis. People always ask me, is that your real name?” And straight into an interview for the Foreign Legion. This might have proved a useful escape route for protagonist Nino Paradis (Oscar Högström), but a medical test (“Toilet. Piss.”) soon puts paid to that, revealing as it does high levels of drugs in his system.
They pay his train fare back to Paris. “In Paris, you can’t stop. I walked. I walked ’til I dropped.” He talks about a succession of dead end jobs. He talks about (and we see footage of) Charlie (Théo Augier), referred to initially as “my double” and never referred to as “my double” again, who works a dangerous job as a deliver boy on a bike, and who reveals to him that he has to lock his early onset dementia-ridden mother (Julie Brochan) in her apartment (she complains from the balcony above that he’s taken the key) to prevent her wandering off.
Further voiceover and images entering a rundown apartment block introduce the voices of the Kurdish couple next door (Zirek, Rusen Houssin) arguing (they can often be heard arguing in other scenes in the apartment during the course of the narrative). Later, enter Nino’s girl Lale (pronounced “Lah-Lay”) (Marta Taquin) who has left numerous phone messages to tell him the heating has been turned off by the landlord. He hasn’t checked his phone. They have sex as a means to keep warm.
Now it comes out: he went to a party at Giulia’s (mercifully, in this instance we see the scene while he is describing it, because there are a few scenes in this film which are verbal reportage only , which probably worked better in the novel by Capucine and Simon Johannin from which this was adapted) where there were a whole load of guests he didn’t know, one of who attempted to rape Giulia (Alma Dubois) before he pulled him off and threw him down the stairs, beating his head into a bloody mess on the pavement outside.
He loses another dead end job when he protests that without gloves, the freezer compartments in which he and others are asked to stack products, are too cold to work in. He runs into his other friend, Malik (Bilal Hassani, whose briefly seen mother is played by his real life mother and biographer Amina Frühauf). At a nightclub, Nino and Lale take some LSD from Charlie, but Nino is still haunted by images of attacking Giulia’s rapist and thinks he’s having a panic attack.
And so it goes on, making for a fascinating comparison with this year’s likewise freewheeling but rather more focused Critics’ Picks entry Mo Papa (Eeva Mägi, 2025). Yet were the latter film uses its minimal resources sparingly but effectively, the current film seems to throw everything at the audience constantly in the hope that a narrative will stick, which can get a little wearing after a while.
Some way in, Nino seeks to better his situation by visiting Farfa (Pierre Nisse) in his underground workshop, an innovative type with a finger in numerous pies who shows Nino a fist-sized gemstone called a Demantoid with which the young man becomes besotted. Farfa’s name, actually a nickname, derives from Farfadet, helpfully described in the English subtitles as a Leprechaun, which is not bad in the brief amount of time an English reader has to take this in, although the term in fact refers to a very specific creature from French mythology. Sadly, it’s a throwaway idea, not developed further. Perhaps there’s more about it in the source novel.
Hearing of Nino’s money troubles – he and Lela have overheard the landlord threatening dire consequences if he doesn’t stump up the money for six months worth of utility bills, not to mention five days’ rent – Farfa offers him a deal involving taking the train to Brussels to deliver a package and pick up payment. It pays well, but means bringing the merch through customs. Taking this on, Nino nearly self-sabotages the job by (1) hitch-hiking there instead of taking the train, (2) letting his smartphone battery die whilst trying to find his contact’s location, (3) removing his top half clothing which contains the envelope with the payment money at a party to which Farfa’s man Valentin (Félix Maritaud) has invited him.
The party proves fortuitous, as he meets Adriaan (Geert Van Rampelberg). who will later introduce him to the lucrative world of fashion modelling. Equally, though, that world with its wealth and snobbery will incite Nino to revolt, turning haute cuisine into a conflagration for the finale.
And yet, another key scene late in the proceedings has someone unexpectedly killed in a road accident, which is only reported, not shown. Perhaps that’s how it was in the novel, but somehow, here in this movie, it’s frustrating. Almost by way of admitting the fact, the film throws in a minor plot strand about Nino writing things in his notebook, which might, arguably, be poetry. Or might just be random writings which don’t amount to much.
The performances are memorable enough, and the visuals (when they actually ARE visuals rather than voiceover) are suitably in your face memorable thanks to Florian Berutti’s grab images on the move cinematography, and that’s enough to deliver a halfway decent film, but the whole is all over the place, sometimes pulling all elements together so it works, sometimes not.
Nino in Paradise premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 7th to Sunday, November 23rd 2024.
Critics’ Picks mashup trailer:
Festival teaser trailer: