Nino’s comment – time is running out for a young man facing cancer in a clever picture of manhood | Video

FPauline Loquès, who makes French films, makes her directorial debut with a beautiful picture of a young man in Paris at the end of the week, struggling. Agnès Varda’s New Wave classic Cléo from 5 to 7. It’s emotional and affecting, if a little understated.

Théodore Pellerin plays Nino, a young man who has not come to terms with the death of his father, and on the evening of his 30th birthday he goes to the doctor because of a slight pain when he swallows; he is told that he has throat cancer, due to HPV (or human papillomavirus) that he may have contracted years ago. In a state of shock – a bewildered Nino constantly asks if he has someone else’s test results – he was told that in order to preserve his chances of having children he must provide a sperm sample to be frozen immediately, this week, before starting chemotherapy and radiotherapy on Monday.

As he faces this difficult task that he sadly does not have, poor Nino shows something between stoicism and an inability to recognize the truth. He has a series of events and situations in which his cancer is the new unmentioned elephant in his living room: he meets his ex, Camille (Camille Rutherford), but cannot tell her the news, leaving her with a postcard; he has a long conversation with his mother (a cameo by Jeanne Balibar) who has her own life to lead; she has to endure her birthday party and then she is locked in her house. Then he has a wonderful meeting with Zoé (Salomé Dewaels), a young woman. The intelligent, gentle Zoé has a relationship with Nino, who has a sad vision of her future with him as a husband and father, a future that will never happen.

There are flaws in the film: how Nino finally gives up that masculinity is worthless and there is something precious and self-assured about Mathieu Amalric. But in many ways it’s a clever portrait of the ways that real life, in all its shame and restraint, doesn’t stand up for bad news.