Things to Come: A Work of Empathy from French Filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve

This review originally appeared in Bob Ham's Portland film screenings newsletter Daily Projections in December 16, 2016.

THINGS TO COME

(Mia Hansen-Løve, 2016, France, 102 minutes)

Actress-turned-filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve turned 35 this year, and Things to Come is her fourth feature, but while her last film, 2014's rambling Eden, explored the pleasures and perils of youth, her new film revolves around the trials and tribulations of a 63-year-old woman. 

Aside from the fact that the writer-director, the daughter of two philosophy professors, avoids the stereotypes usually associated with films about older women, Hansen-Løve prioritizes change over age, since many of the setbacks Isabelle Huppert's Nathalie experiences could conceivably afflict younger women, too (notably, Hansen-Love met her husband, 61-year-old director Olivier Assayas, when she appeared in 2000's Les Destinées).

During the course of the film, the self-possessed philosophy teacher suffers a series of losses when her husband, Heinz (André Marcon from Hansen-Løve's Father of My Children), leaves her for a younger woman and her glamorous, acidly amusing mother, Yvette (Édith Scob, who previously appeared in Assayas's Summer Hours), ends up in a retirement home where her already-perilous mental condition quickly deteriorates. 

Nathalie also tangles with a publishing company that wants to bastardize her textbook to boost flagging sales, but just when it seems as if things can't get much worse, they don't. Hansen-Løve has something more subtle and less wrenching than melodrama in mind. 

In a more conventional film, Nathalie might seek revenge on Heinz, find her own age-inappropriate lover, or start all over again in a new town. Instead, she reconnects with her former student, Fabien (Eden's Roman Kolinka), a fellow academic. When she complains to him, "After 40, women are fit for the trash," he strenuously disagrees.

Hansen-Løve suggests that there may be some degree of physical attraction between the two, but she never pushes that angle too hard. The tall, rangy Fabien shares a cozy home with friends in the remote Rhône-Alpes where Nathalie seeks refuge when Paris gets to be too much of a drag. In their warm, if slightly critical embrace, she finds a form of salvation. 

Unlike Paul Verhoeven's Elle, in which Huppert plays the victim of a violent attack, there's no mystery at play, but the actress commands the screen as easily as she has in the films of Claude Chabrol and Michele Haneke, whether Nathalie is cooing over a baby or stressing about a cat (her mother's beloved Pandora). 

In the press notes, Hansen-Løve, who wrote the part specifically for Huppert, states, "I rate her as the greatest French actress." At the film's outset, Nathalie asks, "Can we put ourselves in the place of the other?" It’s exactly what her director has done, and Things to Come is as much a work of empathy as a portrait of the kind of woman usually consigned to the margins of American cinema.

Images from Film Comment (Isabelle Huppert), the IMDb (Huppert and André Marcon), and TIME (Huppert and Roman Kolinka).