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

The pressures in healthcare and blind trust in their protocols lead everyone to assume that Nino, a 29-year-old man, has gone to the health center well-informed. So he discovers, without any preparation or prior 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 lead people not to listen to each other... However, as the film's title anticipates, the bulk of the efforts are dedicated to portraying its apparently shy, implicitly kind, perhaps emotionally blocked protagonist. 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 also serves as a metaphor.

The weekend that Nino spends from apartment to apartment, from wandering to wandering, can end up seeming like a less tense version of those thrilling in which the Dardenne brothers (Two days, one night) explain human suffering in the form of time-trial narratives. Watching the film is moderately uncomfortable. Some eccentric moments can 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. They are interestingly peculiar deviations that expand a rather contained work, faithful to the character of its central figure and, perhaps, to a certain way of explaining life through Franco-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 the reels of Instagram (a crisis should always be an opportunity?) you fleetingly displaced the general sobriety.