Review: L'Avenir (aka Things to Come)
In L'Avenir (Things to Come), Isabelle Huppert embodies philosophy teacher Nathalie, married for a quarter of a century to Heinz (André Marcon), mother to their two children, and dutiful but exasperated daughter of an excessively needy mother (Edith Scob). She is a woman voluntarily tethered to all these strings, perhaps more to some than others. So what happens when these strings break off one by one?
"I'm lucky to be fulfilled intellectually - that's reason enough to be happy," Nathalie matter-of-factly states at the start of her newfound and unexpected freedom. Her children are grown and have flown the nest. She has reluctantly but necessarily placed her mother in residential care. Heinz resignedly announced that he is leaving her for a younger woman. "But I thought you would love me forever. What a fool," comes Nathalie's rueful but biting response.
Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve tracks the trajectory of Nathalie's happiness which, like life, is marked with waves of loneliness. Nathalie is seen crying in a bus only to burst out with a laugh upon seeing Heinz with his new partner. Her mother's cranky cat Pandora reluctantly becomes her comforter when she's sobbing in her bed. There's Fabien (Roman Kolinka), her favourite student ("the son she would have liked," her own son observes), with whom she shares an ongoing friendship and an intellectual romance. Yet even his luster fades a little when she realises that he has become his own man, investing his beliefs in ideas that differ from her own.
Observational and insightful, L'Avenir unfolds at a patient clip but never feels ponderous and is deceptively simple but awash with complexities. Part of this is due to Hansen-Løve's commanding but unobtrusive direction and thoughtful and considered screenplay. Then there's Huppert, surely France's greatest living actress, who crafts a sublime portrait of a woman in emotional limbo.
L'Avenir (Things to Come)
Directed by: Mia Hansen-Løve
Written by: Hansen-Løve
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, André Marcon, Roman Kolinka, Edith Scob, Sarah Le Picard, Solal Forte
