TIFF 50: Théodore Pellerin delivers a career-best performance in “Nino”
Sunday, September 7, 2025 at 6:00PM 
When describing new films, there's often the temptation to force analogies with past, unrelated works. It's an understandable impulse, akin to shorthand that tends to convey ideas that would otherwise require much more effort to articulate and may not be as clear when all is said and done. In other words, comparisons as such are a crutch for the film critic, verging on cliché. They are also really useful and, at times, almost impossible to avoid. Consider Nino, Pauline Loquès's feature debut, which follows a young Parisian as he reels from a cancer diagnosis and the need to bank some of his sperm if he ever wishes to have biological children. He has three days to make that decision, as he must start treatment by the beginning of next week. So… a genderbent take on Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 that might as well be titled Nino from Friday to Monday? Yes and no…
Aligning the two narratives enables us to better pinpoint what distinguishes each work beyond the sixty-plus years that separate them. Perhaps the most salient distinction is how each film posits these characters in relation to their diagnosis. While Cléo spends her afternoon teetering on a knife's edge of reticent ambiguities, Nino doesn't make it through the first scene without knowledge of his fate. He isn't yet with the doctor, and already his bad health is told to him as fact, the receptionist getting ahead of herself when asking about treatment plans. Soon, he's delivered the news that he's got throat cancer, likely caused by a sexually transmitted HPV infection. He's not even thirty. Hell, this fateful hour marks the eve of his 29th birthday.
Spoiled celebrations aside, by Monday, he'll begin chemotherapy and the path to infertility will be set, giving him little time to freeze his sperm in contemplation of starting a family in an uncertain future. Not that he's sure about ever wanting that. Nino's not sure of anything. If a certainty of fate separates him from Varda's heroine, the trepidation of doubt binds him to her. Primarily, doubt about where he is in life, what choices he's made and, more importantly, what choices he's avoided making, caught in that foolishness so typical of the young. That madness that makes one think they'll always have all the time in the world, unlimited or as good as, since the end is supposedly so far away.
Other cineastes might use this premise to pass judgment on their character, creating a piece of generational bashing that should thrive through some audience's self-flagellating identification and others' sense of superiority. Thankfully, Loquès wants none of that, preferring to set herself down a path of empathy and generosity, holding those values as the tenets to guide the film across Nino's three day odyssey. Only then can a story like this avoid the pitfalls of prescriptive morality or, even more critically, the temptation of wanton miserabilism. Because it's not just the cancer or the birthday. When it rains, it pours, so Nino also lost his keys, meaning he is locked out of his apartment during what's likely to be the worst weekend of his life so far.
The stage is set for a peripatetic structure that finds the Parisian youth floating from place to place, wandering between family and friends and acquaintances, maybe a stranger or two. In fact, the first people he ever tells about the cancer might as well be strangers. Instead, they're fellow coworkers, as drunk as the birthday boy trying to shoo them out of a house party. Intoxication notwithstanding, he's honest with them, which is a new development almost two-thirds into the movie, after he has already deflected various inquiries into his well-being and even outright lied to his mother. It's the start of accepting the reality of what's happening and the urgency of action.
It's also the shake-up the film needs to reinvent itself as the long journey into night circles back to the cold light of dawn. In the new day, Loquès tests the tonal plasticity of her creation, even attempting some paternal juxtapositions between the father Nino lost long ago and a man who offers him kindness at the public baths. Even the picture's decoupage feels reinvigorated, breaking from the prosaic habits of European realism to try the expressivity of an unbalanced composition here, a burst of foregrounded color there, a couple of breaks of the 180-degree rule that might not be wholly purposeful but still pack a punch.
If we were to return to the Vardian comparison, here is where I must admit nothing in Loquès' arsenal of audiovisual solutions even begins to reach the joyful inventiveness that makes that 1962 film one of the Nouvelle Vague's quintessential masterpieces. It's to be expected, one supposes, since the state of contemporary character-driven cinema so often correlates to formal disappointments. That Nino's director has some concrete ideas about how the camera can modulate her drama is already cause for celebration. Moreover, what she lacks in aesthetic audaciousness, Loquès makes up for through her work with actors.
Obviously, Quebecois rising star Théodore Pellerin is the main attraction, adding Nino to a collection of stellar performances that ought to have earned him more international recognition than he has received. Running the gamut from tragic solipsism to catatonic numbness, from an almost comical routine of desperate confusion to quiet tenderness, a hint of ecstasy, a tearful pas de deux down memory lane, he is nothing less than sublime. However, he's far from the only actor who deserves a round of applause for their efforts. With nary a misstep in sight, Pauline Loquès assembled what must surely be one of the year's greatest casts.
As Nino's mother, Jeanne Balibar is a one-scene wonder, expounding on 28 years of familial dynamics while never disclosing too much in ways of comfort or irony. Victoire du Bois sabotages the potential weepiness of the opening consultation, as if staring at sentimentality in the eye before running in the opposite direction. William Lebghil is a safe port amid the storm and Estelle Mayer a zap of chaos, Matthieu Amalric a surprising delight. Salomé Dewaels shines brightest in the supporting ensemble, matching Pellerin every step of the way. Truthfully, she brings the best out of him. By now, it should go without saying that, as far as acting goes, Nino can actually go toe-to-toe with Cléo and come out with his dignity intact. For sure, if you love the art of screen acting, this is as close as it gets to an imperative must-watch.
At TIFF, Nino will have a second public screening tomorrow, Monday, September 8. It's playing as part of the festival's Platform section.
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