‘One Minute to Midnight’ Review: Melvil Poupaud Anchors A Self-Critical, Self-Centered Portrait Of Masculinity In The Age Of #MeToo

The impact of #MeToo in France has reshaped the kind of love stories French cinema tells. It’s not always immediately visible, but there’s a fairly radical shift underway in how what we used to call «romantic films» get made — films that, by this reading, generally positioned women as objects of male desire. In One Minute to Midnight, Nicolas Pariser sets out to dismantle those old constructions through a distinctly male lens, a self-examination that works as a deconstruction of what many of us simply used to call love stories.

The protagonist is Léo (Melvil Poupaud), on the verge of turning 50 and, simultaneously, of separating from his partner. He lives in Nancy but has come to Paris to meet with a lawyer over a complicated inheritance matter involving the estate of his father, an Italian rich man he never knew. But the lawyer postpones their meeting by a week, relocating it to Italy and leaving Léo stranded in Paris to wait. Over those idle days, he takes the opportunity to reconnect with his 19-year-old daughter Ema (Clara Pacini), a university student and left-wing activist living in the city, catching up with her, with her world, and with a social climate that grows more tense by the day — one in which she’s deeply involved.

At the same time, Léo uses the downtime to look up old friends from his past. He used to be a writer and journalist —he co-founded a newspaper back in the late ’90s— and though he’s long since drifted from the profession, he takes the time to visit some of the people he once shared a newsroom with, faces he hasn’t seen in years. Some have become celebrated editors, others left journalism altogether, one went into politics, some changed beyond recognition, some have died, some simply vanished, and others remain more or less the same as ever.

But news that one of his former colleagues is being accused of rape and sexual assault by nearly a dozen women, over incidents dating back to that era, sends Léo spiraling into reflection on his own conduct at the time. In many of his encounters and walks —especially with women— he finds himself asking them how they remember those younger years, and more precisely, how they remember him. Because Léo is slowly realizing that a lot of what he and his friends used to do with the women in that newsroom would today be considered deeply problematic. And he’s trying to understand his own place in that larger story.

A midlife crisis? An attempt to gauge whether anyone might accuse him of something, and cover himself preemptively if they do? Léo himself doesn’t know, and can’t quite articulate it. He may never fully grasp the scope of these changes, tethered as he is to an older way of seeing things. What’s certain is that this unplanned week of downtime gives him the perfect opportunity to look back and try to see himself through others’ eyes. And he comes to realize that the gap between his own version of events and everyone else’s is substantial. One case in particular haunts him: a young woman named Tina, who wrote about film and was the most desired woman in the newsroom among the men there. He can’t manage to track her down. And he becomes obsessed with finding her.

One Minute to Midnight presents itself as a generational reckoning for men of a certain age — those Pariser pegs as being between 45 and 55 today — some of whom have grown aware of their own past behavior and are attempting an honest reckoning with it, set against a shifting cultural backdrop. There’s admittedly a fair amount of «self-help manual for men grappling with #MeToo» in it —a self-critical tone that’s nonetheless somewhat self-centered, much like the character himself— but woven through it is also a genuine meditation on love stories: how cinema has told them, and specifically, how that has evolved across the decades.

The film from the director of Alice and the Mayor is structured mostly as a series of conversations — most of them on the move, on the street, a handful in bars and homes. In that sense, formally, the film replicates to perfection the tightly wound formula of French bourgeois drama, even as it tries, thematically, to interrogate it. Léo goes to the theater, reads Joseph Roth, visits a film set shooting something that hits uncomfortably close to home, and it’s only when he’s with his daughter that he seems to collide, more directly, with something resembling reality. But not enough to shake him loose from the narcissism driving him to seek a reassuring answer about his own past.

In that respect, the film’s political subplot —a mounting, somewhat vaguely sketched wave of urban unrest that pushes the government toward cracking down on protesters— feels a bit forced, there mainly to raise the specter of another historical turning point, one that might drag France back toward its pre-#MeToo era. «Democracy, and the world as we know it, might cease to exist,» an old friend and brief former flame, Armelle (Anaïs Demoustier), now a prominent socialist politician, tells Léo, fearful of the far right’s rise in her country. «What we don’t know is whether it’ll be brief, or whether it’ll last 200 years,» she adds. That anxiety runs in parallel to the central thread of Pariser’s film. The political-cultural battle is one still being fought daily, in cinema and, especially, in the streets.