Proxima - Die Astronautin

The subject is a European Space Agency mission called Proxima, astronauts will travel from the Russian launch site to the space station and stay there living and working for a year. The prime subject of the movie is the single French mom who has an eight year old daughter. Being separated for that long will be difficult for both of them.

This is not a space action movie, in fact it ends with the blast off. It is a character study, surely inspired by the many mothers who have done something similar over the past 35 to 40 years. During the end credits are a montage of several female astronauts and their families, from a variety of countries.

This is a good movie, my wife and I enjoyed it at home on DVD from our public library.

I have to say I went in optimistic and left disappointed.

Apparently the writer thinks that only female astronauts are parents. Either that, or male astronauts don't really have relationships with their children. I don't think one would ever see a movie like this where a male astronaut's relationship with his child was the primary focus of the movie. And then, at the end of the movie, she does something really stupid that would very likely end her career and possibly put her colleagues in danger. The parts of the movie that are about preparing to go into space were interesting (though slow), but the human drama parts were annoying.

Proxima is a very sincere, intimate and devoid of pathos cinema. This is the psychological portrait of a woman devoted to her dream of flying into space. When the main character approaches her goal, she begins to understand how difficult it will be to leave the planet. The picture is more like a documentary than a science fiction story. Great Eva Green and good pictures of the Bajkonur spaceport deserve praise.

Sarah (Eva Green) is given the chance of a lifetime to go to the International Space Station for a year. The trouble is it means leaving her beloved daughter Stella (Zélie Boulant-Lemesle). The film charts her exhausting and often restrictive training whilst she tries to cope with leaving her daughter and trying to do and say the right things.

This is actually quite a simple tale, told and acted well about the relationship between mother and young daughter when pressures threaten to pull them apart. Green in excellent struggling between the two most important things in her life, whilst young Boulant-Lemesle is extremely impressive as Stella. Care, this is a straight sometimes moving drama. It is not an adventure or a sci-fi film, you've been warned, although the training is interesting.