A year in the strife

LOOKING BEYOND A DRAMATIC MID-LIFE CRISIS Things to Come

The films of Mia Hansen Love are nebulous, digressive, delicate, unresolved and, like many of us, have a rather fraught relationship with time. Weeks and months melt, vanish; years flit by. Her last picture, Eden, followed the lively escapades of a hip Parisian DJ who is young until suddenly he isn’t — two decades in the club having elapsed so discreetly that one hardly noticed the leap from cherubic up-and-comer to démodé mediocrity.

Scarcely more than a calendar year passes in Things to Come, which makes it something of an anomaly within her oeuvre of era-spanning films. Not that Hansen Love seems any less interested here in the march of time. In fact the movie addresses this hobby horse straight away: its French title, L’Avenir — “the future” — appears five minutes in atop François-René de Chateaubriand’s tidal-island grave, a wry portent and an amusing joke. Yes, the grave is indeed in our future. Such deathly gloom, suffused with a dry humour, pervades every minute that follows, pursued to ends both figurative (terminated contracts, a messy divorce) and literal (you know what). Life itself is in agreement again on this point. We don’t just one day wake up old. One day we don’t wake up at all.

Hansen-Love has always been forthright about the autobiographical character of her fiction. Hansen-Love’s mother Ole was a professor of philosophy who separated from her husband, Mia’s father, in middle age. So naturally the heroine of Things to Come, Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert), is a professor of philosophy who separates from her husband in middle age. Admirers will be relieved: the strip-mining of personal history continues apace.

Divorce isn’t the story, though, so much as the story’s catalyst: her surprise abandonment — Heinz (Andre Marcon), the husband, leaves her for another woman — dovetails with several other rejections, losses and betrayals, including the decision of an academic publisher to discontinue her long seminal philosophy textbook (an uproarious bureaucratic rebuff that Huppert plays perfectly) and, most affectingly, the passing of her mother (Edith Scob), whose beloved cat Pandora she finds herself reluctantly adopting as a keepsake. Life thus blown to bits, Nathalie must face things to come: upheaval, solitude, spinsterhood.

She’s a 60-year-old woman whose every routine and custom has vanished more or less overnight. How do you adjust to such bedlam? How do you find happiness thereafter?

That adjustment, and that pursuit, are the dramatic substance of the film. Unlike a more conventional mid-life crisis picture, change doesn’t compel Nathalie to radical reinvention. Delicate and unresolved are still the Hansen Love watchwords, and what efforts toward fulfilment Nathalie undertakes are modest. Still times goes on. Things to Come charts its year briskly, never stopping to linger for long on any one moment or event. The days recede and fade and evaporate — as they invariably do. ★★★

The director’s mother was a philosopher who separated from her husband in middle age. So naturally the heroine of Things to Come, played by Isabelle Huppert, left, is a philosopher who separates from her husband in middle age.