THE FRAUGHT PURSUIT OF ADULT HAPPINESS
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 and 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— two decades in the club having elapsed so discreetly that one hardly noticed the leap from cherubic up-and-comer to outdated mediocrity.
Scarcely more than a calendar year passes in Things to Come, which makes it something of an anomaly compared to her usual era-spanning films. Not that Hansen-Love seems any less interested 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 Francois-Rene 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).
Hansen-Love has always been forthright about the autobiographical character of her fiction. Her 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.
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, and, most affectingly, the passing of her mother (Edith Scob).
Life thus blown to bits, Nathalie must face things to come: upheaval, solitude, spinsterhood. 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. The days recede and fade and evaporate — as they invariably do.