L’avenir
Mia Hansen-Løve (2016)
In a Miranda July film called The Future that appeared in 2011 the plot centred on the adoption of a stray cat. Finding a new home for a feline features in Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest too. Perhaps L’avenir has been released in this country as Things to Come to avoid any risk of confusion with July’s The Future – and on the reasonably safe assumption that few people will get it mixed up with earlier Things to Come. This title evidently comes along in cinemas once every forty years. According to IMDB, the estimable H G Wells-inspired science-fiction film of 1936 was followed in 1976 by a low-budget sci-fi sexploitation movie, with the tag line ‘Soon … There Will Be Machines That Can Do Anything!’ The new Things to Come is too refined to have any tag line at all.
Hansen-Løve’s story is set mostly in Paris, where its main character, a middle-aged philosophy professor called Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert), lives and works. Nathalie is married to Heinz (André Marcon), also an academic philosopher. The couple have two adult children, Chloé (Sarah Le Picard) and Johann (Solal Forte). The main action begins in 2007, when student protests against Nicolas Sarkozy’s university reforms were making headlines. The protests remind Nathalie of her own distant radical youth; an unexpected meeting with Fabien (Roman Kolinka), a gifted former student now involved with a leftist-going-on-anarchist group of writers, evokes her more recent past. Hansen-Løve shows scenes from Nathalie’s current working and family lives: she teaches; she listens to a publishing outfit’s plans to repackage, in a more eye-catching format, the scholarly texts she wrote some years ago; she repeatedly visits her neurotic mother Yvette (Edith Scob). Then Heinz informs Nathalie that he’s been seeing another woman and is going to move in with her. Yvette goes into a care home and dies there, leaving her cat an orphan. The crass publishers decide not to republish Nathalie’s work. She and the cat go to spend a few days in Fabien’s household in the Alps above Grenoble, where the animal briefly goes missing and Nathalie feels out of place. A year later, Chloé has a baby. Nathalie returns to the Alps, for one night only, to drop off the cat, which Fabien has now agreed to take in. Nathalie comes back to Paris to prepare a Christmas meal. The film ends with a pleasant family gathering: her son, her daughter and Chloé’s partner relax at the dinner table, while Nathalie sings a lullaby to her grandchild in the next room.
Mia Hansen-Løve succeeds in avoiding the obvious in Things to Come – Nathalie doesn’t rekindle her past through renewed political engagement or an affair with Fabien – but fails to find much to replace the obvious with. When he drops her off at the station near the end of the film, Fabien remarks to Nathalie how solitary she is. She cheerfully refutes this – she reminds him she’s now a grandmother – but there is, for the first time, a look of concern on Fabien’s face as he starts his journey back home. Whether the look is meant to suggest that he’s in love with Nathalie or is just worried about her isn’t clear but Fabien was certainly right about the heroine’s aloneness. On one occasion, a few of her current students call at her home; otherwise, she has no friends or work colleagues or former students whom she sees socially – although there’s no suggestion that she’s anti-social. An only child, she appears to have no relatives other than her mother and her children: Yvette dies and, once the story is underway, Nathalie’s contact with Chloé and Johann is restricted to special occasions (the maternity ward, the Christmas get-together). For a mother and a middle-class professional with a substantial academic career behind her, Nathalie is remarkably isolated. As the protagonist of a movie drama about the disappearance of old certainties and having to face new challenges, she’s isolated in just the way you’d expect. In other words, she’s a woman alone for the film-maker’s convenience.
Canny use is made of Nathalie’s academic field too: Things to Come wears philosopher-king’s new clothes. The writer-director encourages us to admire the seriousness of her intent by sticking in passages from Rousseau, Montesquieu et al – she gets a strong emotional effect from having Nathalie read at her mother’s funeral a piece of Montesquieu about religious belief and doubt. The camera pans across shelves of philosophy books in the Chazeaux home: Hansen-Løve knows that plenty of viewers will be flattered into thinking these volumes signal they’re watching a movie of greater depth than they would be if the shelves were crammed with cheap ornaments. When it comes to realising intellectual life under her own steam, however, Hansen-Løve backs off. Nathalie lends Fabien a book that she admires. He calls round at the family home (when Heinz is still part of it) to pick up some other texts, returns ‘The Radical Loser’ and Nathalie asks what he thought of it. Fabien acknowledges the book is well written but feels it preaches to the converted, and confuses radicalism and terrorism. In response to both charges, Nathalie says only, ‘I don’t agree’. Unless we’re meant to think she has feelings about Fabien that get in the way of her arguing with him (and that isn’t substantiated by anything that follows), there seems no justification for Nathalie’s feeble reply other than that Mia Hansen-Løve couldn’t write a better one.
There’s more Rousseau in the closing stages, on the achievement of happiness and the greater importance of continuing to desire: this interesting proposition is empty of dramatic meaning since we don’t know whether – and, if so, what – Nathalie continues to desire. This illustrates a besetting weakness of Things to Come. Mia Hansen-Løve gives us no sense of what the break-up of her marriage means to the heroine, beyond disputed ownership of a few of the philosophy books. The same goes for her mother’s death. (While Yvette is alive, Nathalie is a rather grumpily dutiful daughter – her foolish mother takes up too much of her valuable time.) Hansen-Løve doesn’t appear to be interested in this kind of complication: all that matters to her is that Nathalie’s marriage and mother are long-standing fixtures in her life that come to an end. It’s no surprise that the script is equally negligent about relatively minor details. Nathalie insists that a feline allergy means she can’t herself take on her elderly, underweight mother’s elderly, overweight pet. Nathalie briefly gets more attached to the animal (although a burden-of-the-past, the cat is also all-she-has-to-remember-her-mother-by) and it sleeps beside her, with no sign of an allergic reaction resulting. The fact that the cat, which has spent all its life in a Paris apartment, is dispatched to alpine countryside implies a startling lack of pet rehoming opportunities in and around the French capital.
By depriving the protagonist of the family, social and intellectual consolations that might be available to a woman in her position, Hansen-Løve raises questions in the viewer’s mind as to how typical Nathalie’s experience is meant to be – and what the point of the film is if she’s not somehow typical. The answer to these questions may well be found in the short Wikipedia article on Things to Come. This claims that Mia Hansen-Løve ‘wrote the role of Nathalie with Isabelle Huppert in mind’ and ‘admitted that the character of Nathalie was loosely based on her own mother who was a philosophy professor who separated from her husband later in life’. Hansen-Løve’s previous film Eden was inspired by her brother’s experiences: once again, she’s assumed that the great immediate importance to her of the biographical material with which she’s working is inevitably conveyed by the movie she’s made from it. The assumption is fundamentally wrong but Things to Come is more successful than Eden and there’s a simple explanation for this: the lead actress.
When it comes to unworthy husbands, André Marcon is evidently the go-to man in French cinema just now (he partnered Catherine Frot in Marguerite); Roman Kolinka’s somewhat cross-eyed good looks give the underwritten Fabien a bit of distinctiveness; but Isabelle Huppert is virtually the whole show. She holds the film together and she holds your attention. Her kind of expressivity – lapidary, controlled – is very effective here: the strict rationing of overt emotion makes for greater impact when Huppert does allow herself smiles, tears or anger. She also confirms her place in the tradition of French screen actresses who achieve the visual equivalent of what fine-voiced British actors were proverbially reckoned to do reading the telephone directory. Like Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman or Juliette Binoche in Hidden, Huppert’s Nathalie is fascinating to watch simply going about routine domestic business. (A sequence in which she’s at a movie and pestered by a man in the sparse audience is muffled by the rather daft joke of Isabelle Huppert sitting in a cinema seat watching Juliette Binoche on the screen.) Huppert’s charisma and lack of theatrical mannerism combine to draw you to Nathalie and to make her seem real. She disguises what a sketchy, careless film Mia Hansen-Løve has made. Huppert does this so successfully that the 2016 Berlin Film Festival jury awarded Hansen-Løve the Best Director prize for Things to Come. To compound the injustice, they didn’t give Isabelle Huppert the Best Actress award.
4 September 2016
