24/09/2026 - Nicole Garcia hits the mark with a film carried by a dazzlingly sombre Marion Cotillard who plays a mother trying to reconnect with a son she barely knows

"Woe betide the vanquished!" Must youthful ideals be buried for good? Can lost time be made up, bonds renewed and absences repaired? "Do you remember your twenties"? The scars and heavy secrets of the past form the focus of Nicole Garcia’s fierce and canny new film, Milo, which was presented in competition at the 74th San Sebastián International Film Festival.

It all begins at night, on a bus criss-crossing central France and depositing a woman in the drab and grey surrounds of Romans-sur-Isère. Who is she? Where does she come from? What is she looking for? The keys and answers to these questions are shared very gradually by way of an excellent screenplay (written by the French filmmaker in collaboration with Olivier Demangel and Laurette Polmanss) which plays subtly on the surface and at depth as it follows a small circle of characters caught in a web of destiny spun 19 years earlier.

"I can’t see you being afraid. I feel like you should be somewhere else." Hired in a local cafeteria, Alice (Marion Cotillard in one of her best roles), who claims to have lived in Quebec, turns out to be a former inmate who’s on parole after spending 15 years behind bars. Her sole aim is to see her son Milo again (the charismatic and convincing Théodore Pellerin), who was four when she totally vanished from his life and was later adopted (by Laure Calamy) after several stints in care. But how should she approach him, explain herself, and shed her sense of guilt and shame? And how will the young man react, given his own life as a mechanic with plans for the future, an adoptive family and another circle which he’s orbiting, drawn by its wealth and dragged down into shady dealings by Joseph (Alexis Manenti)? Ultimately, Alice watches and gets to know Milo without revealing herself to him…

Built on a kind of double investigation (the mother’s investigation of her son and the viewers’ investigation into the protagonist’s far-left revolutionary past), Milo manages to remain focused on the moving and intimate reality which binds its two central characters together, whilst also interweaving a multitude of compelling collateral strands (the price paid by a late-1980s generation whose ideals drifted into violence against the State, the barriers between social classes, the definition of motherhood and of family belonging). Keenly capturing the impersonal atmosphere of small provincial towns’ peripheral zones thanks to fine work by Belgian cinematographer Yves Cape, the film perfectly renders a sense of in-betweenness and its ripple-effects which feed into the story, and strikes just the right balance as a highly restrained melodrama (and rightly so) at the crossroads of fiction (with hints of genre cinema and a lovely score by Amine Bouhafa) and gently melancholic social realism, as suggested by a line from The Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire slipped into the narration: "To savour, while longing for the white, torrid summer, the yellow, gentle ray of the late season!"

Milo was produced by Les Productions du Trésor in co-production with France 3 Cinéma, StudioCanal (who are handling international sales), Marcel Films, Les Films Pelléas and Belgian company Artémis Production.

(Translated from French)