La Permission de minuit (2011) - film review

David, a professor of dermatology, has been treating 13-year-old Romain since he was a baby.  Afflicted with a rare skin condition, Romain must avoid sunlight and is condemned to live in the shade.  David and Romain have become the closest of friends and nothing can separate them.  But then David learns that he is about to be transferred to another clinic in another town.  How will he be able to break the news to Romain?  And how will Romain cope with this new crisis in his life?

On paper, La Permission de minuit reads like a throwback to those grim medical dramas of the ’60s and ’70s - painfully contrived tearjerkers that ruthlessly competed with one another to see which could provide the greatest boost to the Kleenex share price.  The synopsis certainly doesn’t bode well for those who have an aversion to gratuitous heartstring pulling.  A teenager with a life-threatening skin condition has grown to depend on his doctor, who considers him a substitute son, but Fate cruelly intervenes to separate them forever.  Cue violins.  Cue mass stampede towards the door marked Exit.  Mercifully, first impressions can often be wide of the mark and La Permission de minuit is a film that massively defies our preconceptions.  It engages our emotions, not through the usual melodramatic contortions, but in subtle and profound ways and offers a remarkable insight into an area of human experience that most of us have no knowledge of.

In her most accomplished film to date, director Delphine Gleize weaves a compelling drama around the relationship between a committed skin doctor and an adolescent patient suffering from an exceptionally rare skin disease, xeroderma pigmentosum (XP).  The latter is an illness that affects one person in a million and compels its sufferers (commonly known as Moon Children) to avoid daylight at any cost, as ultraviolet radiation can stimulate a lethal cancerous growth.  Arguably, the main value of this film is that it promotes wider awareness of XP and gives an uncompromising insight into the lives of those who suffer from this terrible condition.  What the film shows us is so far from what our own experience that at times it resembles a piece of science-fiction fantasy, and what makes it so particularly moving is the juxtaposition of the apparently unreal (such as boy having to go around in an anti-radiation-like suit to protect him from sunlight) with the mundane.

La Permission de minuit is a classic love story, centred on two very different individuals who must learn to overcome their mutual dependency and begin to live separate lives when they are forced apart.  In the hands of a lesser director and screenwriter, this could have ended up as a soggy pathos-saturated melodrama of the worst kind, but Delphine Gleize handles the subject with restraint and delicacy, avoiding the clichés and instead delivering a richly humane and poignant drama.  In this, she is ably served by her two lead actors - Vincent Lindon and Quentin Challal, who play respectively the doctor, David, and his patient, Romain.  In a similar vein to his contribution to Philippe Lioret’s Welcome (2009), Lindon gives a riveting portrayal of a middle-aged man who appears to be teetering on the edge of an existential crisis whilst engaging fully with the problems that life throws at him.  Such is the depth and sincerity of Lindon’s performance that it renews your faith not just in cinema, but in human nature generally.    

The film’s most powerful sequences are undeniably the two-handed scenes with Lindon and Challal, the latter a revelation in his first screen role, looking and acting like the Wild Child from Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (1969).  There is a deliciously feral quality to Challal’s performance which is not only a perfect complement to the tortured humanity that Lindon brings to his portrayal, but also an effective repellent to any sentimentality that may have been lurking just out of camera shot.  There is nothing of the demure dewy-eyed victim in Challal’s interpretation of Romain.  Rather, he is your typically wild teenage boy who is in too great a hurry to grow up and enjoy what life offers him.  Where the film is marginally less successful is in its exploration of the relationships between the two main characters and their entourage.  Despite the quality of the acting (which is exemplary throughout), these digressions add little substance to the drama and weaken its focus, particularly in the film’s second half.   Fortunately, Gleize’s assured direction and the authenticity which Lindon and Challal invest in their performances are sufficient to sustain the film even when its narrative has so obviously run out of steam.  Whilst La Permission de minuit could perhaps have had greater impact if its had focussed more on the central relationship of David and Romain, it still manages to be a captivating and moving piece of drama, as brutal as it is tender, and a sobering reminder of the little miracles of life that most of us take for granted.

© James Travers 2011

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