Laurent Micheli has presented his third feature film, Nino in Paradise, in a world premiere within the Tallinn Black Nights Festival’s Critics’ Picks section. After Even Lovers Get the Blues [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], a sexual but romantic, pop, modern portrait of a younger generation questioning everything, and then Lola [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Laurent Micheli
scheda film], following a young transgender girl who’s estranged from her father and who makes a break for a brighter life, the director is returning with this new movie adapted from Capucine Azaviele and Simon Johannin’s novel of the same name, which was published in 2019 to critical acclaim.

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It follows the chaotic trajectory of Nino (Oscar Louis Högström), a highly strung young man who’s walking on a knife edge. After getting carried away in a fight during a party while attempting to defend a female friend, he tries to disappear into the French Foreign Legion, who reject him as if a foreign body. He subsequently returns home to his loved ones, but also to his problems: where should he sleep, what can he eat, how can he make ends meet? Like a hero in a picaresque novel or a psychedelic game of survival, he embarks on successive adventures and falls but always gets back up again, driven by a quest whose significance will only become clear at the end of his journey. In the meantime, alongside his girlfriend Lale (Mara Taquin) and his best friends Charlie (Théo Augier) and Malik (Bilal Hassani), he tries as best he can to withstand the storm in a world which refuses to wait for them and which doesn’t fulfil their aspirations. Between small- and big-time trafficking, weed and diamonds, fashion and poetry, Nino flies blind, armed with nothing but the riches of friendship (which he almost squanders at one point) and the luxury of his belief in freedom.

Sleeping on things doesn’t always go well for Nino and his friends, since nighttime is a place where anything is possible, freed from the social conventions constraining daytime. It’s a place of intimacy and hope but also perdition. With passion, Laurent Micheli films the ardour of this young generation who are trying to find themselves, struggling in a world driven by consumerism which uberises their bodies and their dreams. But whilst precariousness and all the instability this brings is part and parcel of our protagonists’ daily lives, it definitely doesn’t define them. The film’s colours often dazzle, music pounds, and Nino’s off-camera voice, transforming from a simple, autobiographical “I” to a poetic turn of phrase over the course of the story, lends this work an assured sense of lyricism which looks to breathe a fictional, Romanesque air into this societal portrait. The film is ripe with intentions, twists and turns, and aesthetics, to the point it’s almost too much, but this fits perfectly with its young cast whose energy and commitment unquestionably steal the show.

Nino in Paradise was produced by Wrong Men (Belgium) in co-production with Haut et Court (France). World sales are entrusted to Paradise City Sales.