Midnight at the Paradise: A Double Date with Destiny

It’s difficult to capture one believable love story full of yearning, passion, and resonant ruefulness in a single film, let alone three love stories with these qualities, but Midnight at the Paradise—which made its Texas premiere last Friday—manages this effortlessly. Centering on three couples faced with dilemmas on one fateful, transformative night, Vanessa Matsui’s directorial debut is a rich and romantic tale. Within this wistful narrative full of “what if”s and wanting lies a profound appreciation for film and the way it shapes moments in our lives.

We follow a woman named Iris (Liane Balaban) who is perfectly content in her hectic but humble life with her husband Geoff (Ryan Allen), their daughter Alice, and Iris’s sickly but spry father Max (Kenneth Walsh.) But Iris’s looks of longing suggest something is tugging at her, and when she sheepishly grins at a “see you tonight” text on her phone, this theory is confirmed. We’re then introduced to Alex (Allan Hawco), the punk kid turned capitalist music agent who once broke Iris’s heart, and the sender of this suggestive text. He puts his phone away when his fiancée, Anthea (Emma Ferreira), proposes that she travel along with him to Toronto to see the band he claims he’s about to sign—to which Alex wincingly agrees.

Iris has been planning a special midnight screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless at a beloved old theater called The Paradise, partly as an homage to her elderly father—who was once a legendary film critic—and partly as a way to meet up with her old flame Alex. But Iris faces an uncomfortable predicament when Geoff gets the night off of work, books a hotel room, and tells her that he wants to come to this screening and make a special occasion of it.

Charmaine (Kate Trotter), Iris’s mother and Max’s ex wife, is then tasked with babysitting her granddaughter and her ex-husband—a set-up that results in a few choice words exchanged and several walks down memory lane. Neither Iris nor Alex know how their semi-spontaneous rendezvous will now play out, with their pesky significant others in the way and all, but when both couples bump into each other outside of The Paradise, all of their anxious questions are soon answered.

What follows is a chaotic double-date full of stories from the past, revelations in the present, and paranoia about the future that have every reason to translate into panic, but somehow come across as cozy and genuine. Iris and Alex have differing opinions about how their relationship came to an end, and Geoff and Anthea have a sneaking suspicion that there is enough unfinished business between these two to threaten the blissful relationships they at least thought they coexisted in.

Meanwhile, back at Iris and Geoff’s house, Charmaine tries to take care of the charismatic but cantankerous Max, but his greatest desire at this juncture of his illness and his age is to be allowed to die. As Charmaine wrestles with this unimaginable request, sparks steadily begin to fly between Iris and Alex, as if they’ve spent no time apart at all. Geoff and Anthea are rightfully concerned as they awkwardly accompany their partners through the shining streets of Toronto, and eventually, some incredibly hard truths must be confronted.

There is a fourth romantic storyline at play here, that exists above the mortal parameters of human relationships: a love affair with cinema. Throughout this midnight journey, a deep respect and admiration for the power of film can be felt just as much as the growing sense of existential puzzlement. Back in Max’s glory days as a critic, he always said “it’s a movie—let it be a movie”; but the raw love stories on display here only underscore how our purest pleasures can be the cause of our messiest confrontations. We never really know if the grass is actually greener on the other side, but Midnight at the Paradise tests this hypothetical from every angle, and presents a charming exploration of relationships, grief, and the agonizing catch-22 of loving two people at once.

The beating heart beneath this film is generated by its superbly talented cast, who handled each heartbreaking, hilarious moment with dedication and deftness. Bill Robertson’s excellent script features authentic characters with realistic stakes, and as each couple stumbles from one revealing conversation to another, you begin to fall in love with every single one of them—flaws and film-snobbery and all.

Midnight at the Paradise is a film for lovers, and for lovers of film. It romances and enchants you while offering a substantial amount of wisdom and a commentary on what matters most in this world: the people we love, and the movies we watch with them.