Laurent Micheli presented his third feature film, Nino in Paradise [+lee también:
crítica
entrevista: Laurent Micheli
ficha de la película] - an adaptation of Capucine Azaviele and Simon Johannin’s eponymous novel - in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival’s Critics’ Picks line-up.

Cineuropa: What effect did this novel have on you?
Laurent Micheli: I was really moved by these tormented characters who’re looking for their place in the world; that’s one of my obsessions. I also liked the book’s slightly elevated style, its lyricism which avoids miserabilism. And I felt there was something very cinematic about the writing. The way it depicted young people was fairly unprecedented: with veracity and brutality, but also a great deal of tenderness and sometimes humour, used as an escape. It resonated with me because I already felt like I was rubbing shoulders with those young people, especially in queer circles. I saw a real sociological grounding in the story, and a strong political dimension too, but one that fully embraced the power of fiction. I really liked the contrast between its nigh-on social-documentary side and its fictional lyricism. It’s something I tried hard to reproduce in the movie as a filmmaker; it allowed me to explore a lot in mise-en-scène terms.

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Who is Nino, the film’s protagonist, whom you’ve embedded within a collective, namely his group of friends?
In my mind, his group of friends and, more broadly speaking, the collective, is an answer to the world’s brutality. It might sound a little bit naive, but I think we find strength together. As for Nino, he’s always on a knife-edge. I was interested in devising a character who isn’t always very likeable and whose motives we question. It’s a risk I enjoy taking in cinema.

Other people are his wealth in the face of this precariousness, but you had to find a way to depict that precariousness.
I didn’t want to romanticise it, and that required a lot of work on the writing side, but also in terms of art direction, whether we’re talking about sets, costumes or hairstyles. Today, you often meet young people who don’t wear their poverty on their sleeve - you wouldn’t even suspect it – but they get by on their wits, on petty thefts or minor offences. But I didn’t want my characters to be boxed in either, or defined solely by all that. I didn’t want there to be a sense of insurmountable determinism.

Nino is a character who’s on a mission without knowing it, and he discovers the aim of that mission at the end of the story.
It’s all about a moment in life that I find really poignant, when you’re no longer a teenager but you’re not yet really an adult either. Especially when you don’t hold all the keys, when you lack family support or when you don’t have the right cards in your hand. It’s this grey area of existence that I wanted to show, whilst also emphasising the fact that there can be light at the end of the tunnel. Nino loses himself, a lot, but he’s reborn and rises up by refusing a kind of Faustian pact.

Art becomes an outlet for him. How did you decide upon the place that poetry would occupy for him and for the viewer?
It notably takes the form of a voice-over, which took a lot of work, but we felt it would be a valuable tool for crafting a lyrical, baroque and contrasted film. It was a formal freedom we wanted to offer ourselves, without it being gratuitous; it needed a level of grounding, and poetry provided that. This kind of classical mise-en-scène idea is slowly embodied within the narrative. And it also raises the question of what we’re prepared to do for our art—are we willing to go rogue or resist? What are we prepared to let go of? Inevitably, it’s something that speaks to me.