L'Avenir

As Claude Chabrol said, "Isabelle Huppert makes her own films, the director and everybody else are just there to help". This one is perfectly suited for her restrained style. A woman´s life is changing considerably and she carries on. Simple enough but oh there´s so much more to it. This realistic story-telling makes a short scene of her tearing up in the car more effective than a full house melodrama. A serious, intelligent film with poignant reflections on maturity, idealism and more. The realism holds its logic all the way until the ending.

For someone used to french cinema it isn´t that outstanding but it´s such a serious piece of film-making it stands out among the rest. In my opinion the last section could have been trimmed and I have a couple of petty complaints but overall it´s still a compelling film. A pleasant drama that should easily satisfy anyone who knows what they´re getting into.

Until this movie I never quite got the hype for Mia Hansen-Løve. Her slice-of-life, semi- autobiographical movies seemed forgettable to me. Maybe Hansen-Løve is growing as an artist, or maybe it's just Huppert. Whatever it is, Things to Come, is a movie that's stuck in my mind, a beautiful portrait of a woman whose life is upended just as she is entering the final third of her life.

The great French actress Isabelle Huppert plays Nathalie (based on Hansen-Løve's own mother). A successful philosophy professor with two grown children, a fellow philosopher for a husband, and an ailing mother, she is comfortably settled in her life. But as the movie continues on we watch as the things that Nathalie considered so much a part of her, change, dissolve, disintegrate.

I'll admit it, I was actually initially reluctant to watch the movie because the idea of seeing a woman having everything taken away from her seemed almost too sad to bear. And yet Things to Come is a surprisingly joyful movie. Nathalie isn't an automaton, she cries as the things she once counted on as part of her life are no more, but at the same time she picks herself up, dusts herself off and goes on.

I have to admit I haven't seen any of the other films to have been directed by Mia Hansen-Love but if they are as good as "Things to Come" she will already have made her mark as one of the great directors working today, not that a great deal happens , in the conventional sense of 'cinematic action', in "Things to Come". This is simply a portrait of a woman, (Isabelle Huppert), who has settled into middle-age, neither particularly happy nor particularly unhappy. She is a teacher and writer of philosophy who uses the philosophical treatises she's always lived by to get through her largely uneventful life.

She has a dull, middle-aged husband who also teaches, two grown children and an ageing, ill mother, (Edith Scob from "Eyes Without a Face"), when suddenly her life is thrown into disarray, Nevertheless she copes, mainly due to her friendship with a younger man who was once one of her students, There is a suggestion that they might become romantically involved but it's just a hint in a film full of hints.

This is serious stuff, intellectually rigorous and yet full of humor; a film for intelligent, grown-up audiences who like to take their brains with them when they go to the pictures and Huppert, who is never off the screen, is stunningly good. Every gesture she makes, the way she walks, tells us something about this woman as much as what she says. This is great acting.

Everyone else follows suit. Roman Kolinka as Fabien, the New-Age would-be anarchist she comes to rely on, if only for company, could have been such a cliché but Kolinka brings depth and shadings to the role and makes him likable and interesting. Even Andre Marcon as the dull husband is dull in a way that makes him sympathetic rather than a figure of fun.

By now you might have realized that I loved this film as much as any I've seen this year. Is it a masterpiece? Probably not. In the end it's gossamer thin but it is also a gem, a beautiful uncut diamond of a movie. See it at all costs.

This is the first of the half dozen films Mia Hansen-Love has made that I have seen and I'm impressed. Helped enormously by the powerful and ever convincing central performance of the wonderful Isabelle Huppert, this is a slight but affecting movie. Thoughtful and thought provoking we are introduced to philosophy teacher Huppert who has a deft and loving touch when involved with her pupils and her more conservative and plodding, though not unlikeable, husband. Beautifully shot, the film floats rather than dwells upon the importance or otherwise of philosophy in one's life, the nature of politics and youthful rebellion and with the assuredness of director and lead actress nothing really perturbs even though there are potentially disturbing upsets along the way. There were a couple of instances that made me sit up and were possibly only included to help propel the film forward for in themselves they seemed most unlikely events. There is a stranger who gropes at Huppert in a cinema, follows her wench she changes seats and even onto the street where he kisses her fully against a wall. Does this really happen in Paris? Towards the end both Huppert and husband take it in turns to hold their daughter's new born baby each declaring it looks like them. Surely throughout the world the claim is by the parents that the child looks like the mother and by the mother that it may look like her parents. These two moments seem more vivid and inappropriate because the rest of the film is so placid but possibly their greater significance was lost on me. Very enjoyable little film nonetheless.

Isabelle Huppert is her usual fascinating self as a put-upon philosophy teacher stoically coping with a cheating husband, a stalker, a neurotic mother and sundry other horrors.

As a bonus the latter is played by the lovely veteran actress Edith Scob constantly on the phone to inform her of her panic attacks.