Things to Come
I thought you’d love me forever
People change, even the people who think they don’t. We develop principles, beliefs, dumb hobbies (e.g., kite surfing1), or whatever, and use these things to anchor ourselves against the tide of time, but the anchor never reaches the ocean floor, and when you look up, you might wonder why the beach moved. When you watch a film about a philosophy professor who hangs out with an anarchist debating the merits and demerits of authorial recognition, you may also find yourself pondering the tenuous grip we have on reality, nature, and self!
Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert) and her family disembark a ferry to a small island off the northwestern coast of France. They’re visiting the Tomb of Chateaubriand. They look around, and after a few seconds, the movie's title card (L’avenir in French, which directly translates to “The Future”) is effectively superimposed on the centered image of the grave.
Nailed it.
But before we get to the ultimate and final of futures, the film takes us through a few years in the life of Nathalie Chazeaux. She lives in a well-appointed and book-filled Parisian apartment with her husband and two children. They work, they read, they take public transit, and they engage with politics at arms-length. A seemingly idyllic life, but no! Director Mia Hansen-Løve paints a portrait of a woman at a crossroads. Nathalie's life is upended when her husband of 25 years announces he's leaving her for another woman. There are no melodramatic outbursts, no grand declarations of despair. Instead, Nathalie confronts this sudden upheaval with quiet resilience and a seeming determination to find meaning in the face of loss. We infer this through the subtle changes she makes in her life: the lectures she gives to her students and the speech she makes at another life event that I won’t spoil.
Hansen-Løve's direction is subtle and graceful. The film unfolds at a leisurely pace, allowing us to immerse ourselves fully in Nathalie's world. The camera observes her interactions with loved ones, her colleagues, and even her students with an empathetic eye. There are no dramatic close-ups or sweeping camera movements. Well, almost none. A few scenes, such as when Nathalie is meeting with her publishers, have uncharacteristic-for-the-film ham-fisted camera movement that distracts from the conversation at hand. It betrays a lack of confidence in the audience’s ability to glean the dramatic meaning from the conversation: the camera must swoop behind Nathalie to show us that a verbal bomb just dropped. This is the smallest of nits in a film that ultimately succeeds as a quiet observation of a woman navigating the complexities of a life turned upside down.
If you’re not a regular consumer of Western European melodramas, you might think this film looks like one of a million tellings about the problems of middle to upper-class people. One scene later in the movie demonstrates a self-awareness of this trope when Nathalie takes a train to visit her friend Fabien in the mountains. While driving to the farm he’s living on, he plays country music from the States, a song written from the perspective of a working-class man’s kid talking to a white-collar worker’s kid. “My daddy makes planes so they fly through the sky; that’s what keeps your daddy up there so high.” But like any film, if you approach it with curiosity and empathy for the characters, Huppert will quickly and easily draw you in. Her performance in this film, like most films she is in, astounds. In one scene, we see her riding the bus across town. She’s in quite a bit of emotional pain already when she happens to see her ex-husband and his Spanish girlfriend on the sidewalk, whizzing by. Huppert’s quiet tears immediately shift to the most believable semi-manic laughter you’ll ever witness. There’s no telling what the future will bring, and life can feel absurdly cruel at times. Huppert’s performance reminds us to focus on the absurd. Just like a good philosophy professor.
Things to Come
Written and Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve
2016
102 minutes
French, German, English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Mubi (with a subscription) or Kanopy (free with a library card from your local library)
My taunting is rooted in a deep envy of the people with time to go kite surfing. It looks fun.