One Minute to Midnight (2026) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for pulsating music
Take a Drink: for classically French romanticism
Take a Drink: when someone dresses him down for it (and its implications)
Take a Drink: for politics
Do a Shot: for political demonstrations
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
Melvil Poupaud has spun up quite the interesting career after debuting as a child actor, working with the likes of Raul Ruiz and Eric Rohmer before becoming a festival fixture with work as varied as A Christmas Tale, Speed Racer, and Laurence Anyways.
One Minute to Midnight follows an academic played by Poupaud who must go to Italy to help settle his late and estranged father’s affairs, but first he has a week to kill in Paris, so he looks up old friends, flames, and makes up for lost time with his principled and politically active 19 year old daughter.
A Toast
Practically to start we learn some background about Poupaud’s character that is so very European- an aging French model meets an Italian noble of some sort and fathers a child out of wedlock, but she never cared for him like that, and he was married with a family anyway. Now his son (Poupaud) is going to Italy to help arrange his estate with the sibling and half family he never met.
This is all a bit of a red herring, though, practically the entire movie exists in the kind of purgatory that comes before that, as Poupaud encounters figures from his past and reevaluates it as an older, at least somewhat more modern-thinking man. At least he’s surrounded by the kinds of people who push him to think this way.
The many, many conversations he proceeds to have circle around lots of ideas about love and power dynamics between the sexes- the above story, his college student daughter’s doubtful cynicism towards it, the colleague who is in the middle of getting by all appearances rightfully canceled (“For old Leftists, Me Too is like the wealth tax- it’s great until you’re concerned.”), the woman he walks and talks with one night after leaving a party who’s a bit horrified and quite critical about the old love story he tells about the office intern he was infatuated with, and then, of course, with that former flame.
It’s almost as chock full with political ideas, like one former fling and now Socialist parliamentarian wondering if France is falling into a cycle of democratic decline. As he talks love and regret across the city, you start to wonder if his daughter is starring in a more vital and interesting film- a motivated demonstrator, every time we see her, she’s engaged in more radical action, and the urgent news broadcasts we overhear and graffiti and growing police presence we observe indicate a society on the edge of something possibly cataclysmic.
Perhaps this is a deeply dry tongue and cheek satire of the petty preoccupations of an aging liberal class living in the past while the country changes under their feet, but it’s also quite earnest in its other concerns, or at least Poupaud’s character certainly is. That other movie never exactly comes, but his Italian trip finally does, underlining the themes of his conversations prior and his complicated provenance. The powerful final shot, though, implies that film is happening nonetheless.
Beer Two
This film is so chatty- just chock full of oodles of exposition delivered via conversation. You’ll practically have read a novel’s worth of subtitles yourself by the ending.
Verdict
One Minute to Midnight is a film with no shortage of conflicting viewpoints of life, love, and politics, unafraid to pit them against each other.
