Star Rating:

Things To Come

Actors: Isabelle Huppert, Andre Marcon, Roman Kolinka

Release Date: Friday 2nd September 2016

Genre(s): Drama

Running time: Germany minutes

Nathalie Chazeaux (Huppert) is a middle-aged philosophy teacher in a Parisian school currently experiencing a student strike on behalf of the faculty. Married with two children, a lot of her spare time is caught up with dealing with her depressed mother (Scob), or, as Nathalie suspects, she's claiming to be depressed so her daughter will visit her more, and fending off her publisher's ideas to recover her academic book, which has failed to garner the expected sales. So the last thing Nathalie needs is for her husband (Marcon) to inform her he's leaving her for a younger woman. For the first time in her life she’s cast adrift…

Like Mia Hansen-Love's previous outings – The Father of My Children, Eden and Goodbye First Love – Things To Come is a detailed character study but here she uses that to explore a rumination on impending old age. Do we have to find love? Is it in our DNA to seek out a partner? Why? Why can’t we just be comfortable on our own? Hansen-Love doesn't take the easy way out by having Nathalie fall in love again. Sure, there are overtures to a romance with her protégé (Kolinka) but that's only because we come to expect one in film; in actuality the friendship is never anything but platonic – we're just hard-wired to assume their friendship will develop into something more. In truth, and this is never put to her protagonist, but Nathalie's one and only love was, is and always will be, books.

And if you're a lover of books, particularly philosophical tomes, then Things To Come Is your Citizen Kane. If not the film can come across as merely a series of high-minded debates with every emotion intellectualised rather than felt. And that's the film in a nutshell – it's to be studied rather than experienced. Thank the heavens then for the wonderful Isabelle Huppert.

While the narrative may not be bursting with energy, Huppert ensures that Things To Come has something of an inherent dynamism. She's constantly on the move, moving from the kitchen to the dining room and back again, chasing errant papers in the park, stomping down boulevards, racing across town to visit her mother, hunting for the cat, or strolling through the countryside. It's as if she settles down and relaxes she might think that her life is empty when the opposite is the case; the first time she does actually sit down and puts her feet up is when her husband tells her he's having an affair.

If Mia Hansen-Love's films can be accused of being cold and standoffish (despite being about a love for dance music, 2014's Eden is emotionally dead), the last scene here is as warm and cuddly as one can get. Let's hope the director can use that as a launch pad for her next film.