Dir: Nicolas Pariser | Cast: Drama France 2026
Nicolas Pariser’s Un peu avant minuit, in competition at Venice, is a politically engaged drama that prefers conversation to confrontation and intellectual uncertainty to easy answers. Set largely in Paris, it unfolds as a loose, discursive examination of politics, relationships, memory and the changing assumptions of a generation.
Melvil Poupaud plays Léo, a 49-year-old former journalist whose life is unsettled when he learns that the biological father he never knew has died. Returning to Paris before dealing with the inheritance, Léo finds himself pulled back into relationships and arguments he might have preferred to leave behind. Poupaud gives him a persuasive mixture of charm, self-awareness and evasiveness: he is a man accustomed to having opinions, but considerably less comfortable when those opinions are turned back upon him.
Pariser populates Léo’s world with a finely judged ensemble. Chiara Mastroianni brings emotional intelligence and ambiguity to her role, while Golshifteh Farahani adds another forceful perspective to the film’s shifting network of relationships. Anaïs Demoustier, as Armelle, is particularly effective in the way she challenges Léo’s assumptions, bringing a combination of directness and vulnerability to their exchanges. Léonie Simaga, Clara Pacini and Micha Lescot further broaden the film’s conversational landscape, giving Pariser a group of characters who rarely fit comfortably into the positions they initially appear to occupy.
The film’s politics emerge organically from these encounters. Feminism, generational conflict, changing ideas about masculinity and the failures of progressive politics are all discussed, disputed and reconsidered. Pariser does not turn his characters into mouthpieces. They interrupt, contradict themselves, misunderstand each other and occasionally arrive at conclusions that are less secure than the arguments with which they began.
This is where the film’s deliberately discursive style becomes its defining characteristic. Pariser, whose earlier films Le Grand Jeu and Alice et le maire also explored the collision between private lives and political ideas, seems less interested here in constructing a conventional thriller or tightly plotted drama than in observing people thinking aloud.
There is an almost old-fashioned faith in dialogue: people are allowed to sit, walk, argue and talk without every exchange being forced towards a narrative revelation. The pace can occasionally feel leisurely, but the looseness reflects Léo’s own uncertainty as he begins to recognise the distance between his political self-image and his behaviour.
Paris becomes an essential part of this process. Rather than presenting the city as a glamorous backdrop, Pariser uses it as a lived-in social and intellectual environment, a place where past relationships and present convictions continually collide. The understated visual approach leaves space for the actors, allowing the film’s ideas to emerge through performance rather than exposition.
What distinguishes Un peu avant minuit is its refusal to offer a tidy political conclusion. Its characters are neither heroes nor ideological representatives; they are people negotiating the uncomfortable gap between what they believe and how they live. Poupaud anchors the film with a character who is sympathetic precisely because he is imperfect, while Mastroianni, Farahani, Demoustier, Simaga, Pacini and Lescot ensure that his perspective is continually questioned rather than allowed to dominate.
The result is a thoughtful, sometimes provocative Paris drama in which inheritance becomes both literal and metaphorical. What Léo inherits is not simply money or family history but a collection of political assumptions, emotional habits and unresolved arguments. Pariser’s achievement is to make that process of reassessment itself the drama — a film about people discovering that changing one’s mind can be considerably more difficult than defending it.
VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 31 August – 10 September