Things To Come

Cert 12A. Selected cinemas.

Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert) is a proud philosophy teacher who does a very good job of looking like she’s in control even when she is not entirely. Now, her handle on her own life is about to turn slippery for the married mother-of-two.

From all sides and with insidious realism, her civilised bourgeois existence is fraying and testing her robust resolve. Apart from her demanding, attentionstarved mother not being long for this world, her husband (André Marcon) announces that he is leaving her for someone younger, something she initially accepts with amicable realism. She also learns that her own text books, a source of great pride for her, are being given an ugly reprint. Her children are both grown up and therefore not around to soak up some of the general upheaval.

Amid all this she finds some comfort in the company of Fabien (Roman Kolinka), a former star student who is now living on a collective farm in an Alpine vale. She embarks on a retreat there but very soon the generation gap with the pretentious graduates, all of whom have a narrow world view, becomes tryingly obvious.

At 35, Parisian writer-director Mia Hansen-Love (Eden, Goodbye First Love) shows wisdom beyond her years in this superbly scripted character portrait based on the late middle-age of her own philosophy-teacher mother. Things To Come is an example of how cinematic storytelling can leave spaces for situations to be considered in a way that is harder in reality. It is light on plot, and moves with a deceptively casual haste, much like life itself.

Huppert’s turn will be listed at the end of the year as one of the finest by an actress. HHHHH HILARY A WHITE