When you open a movie with a vacationing family visiting a historical grave on a coastal hill that looks ready to collapse into the sea, you’ve handed the audience a pretty clear hint: Trouble’s coming.
In the French slice-of-life saga “Things to Come,” writer/director Mia Hansen-Love follows an aging philosophy teacher through a series of career bad news, personal dilemmas and family tensions. But just as the memorial crypt has been battered by ocean waves for centuries without collapse, the intelligent woman at the center of the story is hard to topple.
As played by the indispensable Gallic star Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie is a tough cookie, and a rather tasty one, glimpsed with affection and admiration. A respected intellectual at the local college, she’s learned a lot about life’s challenges by the time we meet her.
Her elderly mother (Edith Scob) is a serious piece of work, using drama-queen suicide threats to get Nathalie to visit, then treating her like nothing special when she arrives. Her standoffish husband, another philosophy department academic, remains a question beyond the limits of her comprehension. After a quarter-century of marriage and two children, she doesn’t expect much more from their home life than complacency and sniping, awkward conversation.
Their grown children are moving on, and the students coming into her classroom are more concerned about day-to-day politics than school. Adding ego insult to injury, her publisher is pushing her signature textbook, now selling poorly, toward the remainder bin. Worse still, she’s charged for picking up copies she used to receive for free.
And yet. Nathalie has a deep reserve of poise and common sense that, combined with Huppert’s camera magnetism, make her impossible to write off. As life and society evolve around her, so does she. While full-bore happy endings have been too hackneyed for French cinema since 2001’s “Amélie,” Nathalie deals with life’s endless obstacles with disenchantment, not despair. When she encounters adversity, it’s a roadblock, not a setback. “I thought you’d love me forever,” she replies to her husband’s announcement that he has a lover.
Nathalie doesn’t literally shrug at the news, but her wryly arched tone indicates that she has sensed this coming for a long time. She allows little flecks of her true self to show, but largely lives behind a carefully erected disguise. Her frosty, modulated reactions are, more than anything else, the point of the movie, not a means to an end. No matter how many times her journey is rerouted by fate, she doesn’t abandon the steering wheel. She’s savoir faire incarnate, adroit at tactfully maneuvering through unexpected contingencies.
The midlife bourgeois letdown isn’t exactly an original topic, but Hansen-Love’s intimate approach is vastly different from what we have come to expect from this sort of motion picture. It’s a loose affair. There’s no overwrought melodrama, no artificial moment of great personal triumph. As Nathalie realizes the freedom that comes with moving ahead on a declining slope, her attitude gradually changes. Perhaps that alluring young student who has remained in touch over the years is beckoning when he tells her that young lovers are available to refined women.
Or not. There’s no real catharsis here, but many witty, unexpected surprises with the bittersweet ingredients of real life. The ending, with Nathalie cradling her first grandchild in her arms, can be interpreted multiple ways. But the late scene where she climbs a sunny hill to look at the fields below feels a lot more hopeful than that opening with her sightseeing on the abyss.
MOVIE REVIEW
“Things to Come”
Grade: B
Starring Isabelle Huppert and Andre Marcon. Directed by Mia Hansen-Love. In subtitled French and German, and English.
Rated PG-13 for brief language and drug use. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 40 minutes.
Bottom line: Witty, unexpected surprises dot this midlife bourgeois letdown
