Film Reviews: Nino | Effi o Blaenau
Theodore Pellerin gives a wonderfully nuanced performance in Pauline Loquèas’s drama Nino, writes Alistair Harkness
French-Canadian actor Theodore Pellerin was unnervingly creepy in last year’s Lurker, but he’s an altogether more sympathetic presence in Nino, a French drama about a young guy reckoning with an unexpected throat cancer diagnosis the weekend before he’s due to start priority treatment. That contracted timeline adds to the subtly absurdist tone co-writer/director Pauline Loquèas is going for as her titular protagonist (Pellerin) suddenly has to figure out how to tell those closest to him he’s developed cancer from an untreated STD when he should be celebrating his 29th birthday.
Adding to his Kafka-esque predicament is the fact that he’s locked himself out of his flat and has been told he needs to provide a sperm sample if he wants to have any chance of having kids following treatment – plot devices Loquèas skilfully deploys to ground the film in the ridiculousness of everyday life. She’s aided by Pellerin’s wonderfully nuanced performance; devoid of melodrama or heart-tugging theatrics, he responds to Nino’s situation the way a real 29-year-old might – absorbing the news and letting the unprocessed trauma of it leak out at inopportune moments.
Mercurial filmmaker Marc Evans (Mr Burton) returns once more to his Welsh roots for Effi o Blaenau, a full-throttle, Welsh-language character study of a young, hard-partying woman living in the depressed industrial town of Blaenau whose low-prospects life takes an even more catastrophic turn after a one-night stand with a disabled soldier.
Played with live-wire rawness by up-and-comer Leisa Gwenllian, the eponymous Effi’s vodka-soaked defiance is both a product of and a reaction to socio-economic and political forces over which she’s had no say, something Evans – adapting co-writer Gary Owen’s acclaimed Greek myth-inspired stage play Iphigenia in Splott – transforms into an inverted myth in which the fall-out from an unplanned pregnancy is the making of Effi rather than the breaking of her.
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