'Nino': when you go to the CAP because you have a sore throat and they tell you that you have cancer

The rush in healthcare and blind trust in their protocols lead everyone to assume that Nino, a 29-year-old man, has been well-informed when he goes to the health center. Thus, he discovers, without any prior preparation or suspicion, that he has cancer. Debut director Pauline Loquès stages the impact of this news while suggesting some themes that hover over the narrative: the precariousness of public services, certain climates of egocentrism and impatience that prevent people from listening to each other... Nevertheless, as the film's title anticipates, the bulk of the effort is dedicated to portraying its protagonist, apparently shy, implicitly kind, perhaps emotionally blocked. Someone who cannot go home as if nothing had happened, also because he has lost his keys and cannot get them back. The small everyday problem functions as a metaphor at the same time.

The weekend that Nino spends moving from apartment to apartment, from wandering to wandering, may end up seeming like a less tense version of those "thrillerized" dramas in which the Dardenne brothers (Two Days, One Night) tell of human suffering in the form of time-trial narratives. Watching the film is moderately uncomfortable. Some eccentric moments may open the door to black humor, to an out-of-place chuckle like the one made by one of the warmest characters in the narrative. These are interestingly peculiar deviations that expand a fairly contained work, faithful to the temperament of its central character and, perhaps, to a certain way of explaining life from French-Belgian auteur cinema. The feelings never overflow, but they are there. Along the way, we find a scene where the emotional begins to mix with the motivational, as if the logic of Instagram "reels" (a crisis must always be an opportunity?) fleetingly displaced the general sobriety.