French flavour to film society’s latest offering
Perth Film Society is looking forward to bringing a taste of French culture to proceedings next month ... writes Rachel Clark.
The society will be showcasing L’Avenir (Things to Come) on Thursday, November 2.
The French name literally means “the future”, which more accurately conveys the film’s open-ended, exploratory structure.
The drama is a 2016 French-German production written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve, starring Isabelle Huppert as middle-aged philosophy professor Nathalie Chazeaux.
Nathalie is the product of a lifetime’s reading and deep thought,who believes she is equipped with robust intellectual armour.
But she isn’t prepared for two sudden, though perfectly ordinary, upheavals to her middle-aged life. First the decline into very poor health of her needy, self-dramatising mother (Édith Scob) and second, the announcement by her husband of 25 years (Heinz, played by a nicely hangdog André Marcon), that he is leaving her for another woman.
On top of this, there are troubles on the professional front, including some toe-curling meetings with the dynamic and innovative crew of younger professionals who seem to have taken over as Nathalie’s publisher.
Not everything is terrible, though, and Nathalie is too stoic, too analytical and has too strong a sense of irony to engage in self-pity. She has warm relationships with her grown-up children, a new grandchild, and an intriguing friendship with a talented former student named Fabien (Roman Kolinka). The possibility of romance hovers in the air between them.
Nathalie’s story is like an undulating wave. She has good and bad days, breakthroughs and setbacks, moments of intoxicated serenity and others where crying on the bed, using her mother’s vast, ill-tempered, black cat as a tissue as the only option.
With patience and unimpeachable tenderness, Things to Come covers all of these stages, while maintaining a good-humoured uncertainty about what the final upshot might be. Circumstances may have allowed Nathalie to be freer than she used to be, but she is also constrained by norms and expectations of which she had been only partly aware.
Her accustomed identity has
L’Avenir, or “Things to Come”, will be screened next month unravelled and she needs to put together a new one, an especially difficult project for a philosopher. Nathalie reinvents herself before our eyes in the film, and we believe in what we see.
At the Berlin International Film Festival, Hansen-Løve won the Silver Bear for Best Director for this piece.
Huppert won several nominations and awards for her performance in the film, including the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress, New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress, and the London Film Critics’Circle Award for Actress of the Year.
The film starts at 7.45pm in the Norie-Miller Studio at Perth Concert Hall. Tickets are £6 on the door, with concessions priced at £5.