Proxima

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.

It isn't a question of how flashy the sci fi is, it is a question of how interesting and challenge it is. Proxima is neither. In fact it is so didactic as to be insulting to the audience and seems to assume the audience are dullards that need repetition.

The movie centers on Sarah, a French astronaut undergoing training before going to the Internation Space Station, and her relationship with her somewhat sensitive daughter Stella. We alternate between her gruelling training and her difficulties being a mother at the same time. Don't expect flashy sci-fi here; the action remains firmly grounded on Earth, with most scenes either at the European Space Agency center in Cologne (looks like any adminstrative building), Germany or in the post-Soviet setting of Star City in Baïkonur, Kazakhstan. Eva Green's performance is amazing, though her role suffers a little from a less-than-realistic twist towards the end. I found Zélie Boulant, who plays little Stella, equally impressive; and the mother-daughter relationship really makes for a beautiful story. The supporting cast is also very good, I though Matt Dillon did a good job as a tough-but-fair NASA astronaut going on the same mission as Sarah. His character seemed a bit like a cliché boorish-American-guy at first, but that faded away fast enough.

POSITIVES:

1) All the scenes with Eva Green's character, Sarah, and her daughter, Stella, are emotional and fantastic 2) I respected the film for not "Hollywoodising" its subject matter 3) There is a scene near the end where Sarah and Stella are talking through a glass shield and Stella's face reflects over Sarah's on the other side of the glass and it was such a beautiful shot

NEGATIVES:

1) I wasn't engaged at all by any of the scenes of Sarah's astronaut training 2) Matt Dillon's character was very cliche and underdeveloped 3) There is no score until the final 15 minutes and that made the film quite boring and not cinematic 4) The film doesn't really have any kind of purposeful story, it's a bit pointless 5) Despite going to a 1:20pm screening I genuinely felt my eyes closing at times

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.