- Golden Globe Awards
Things To Come (France)
Winner of the Silver Bear at the last Berlinale, Things To Come is French director Mia Hansen-Love’s fifth film since 2007. In less than ten years she has proven a unique voice in the French cinema landscape, bringing her distinctive, moody fluidity and approach that often evoke Nouvelle Vague masters Eric Rohmer and Philippe Garrel.Here, Isabelle Huppert plays Nathalie, a Parisian high school philosophy teacher in her late fifties, soon to be retired, with two grown up children out of the house and a whiny mother in declining health. Her cozy affluent and drama free life unexpectedly implodes when her husband of twenty-five years, also a philosophy teacher, bluntly announces he is leaving her for a younger woman. Instead of falling apart, she embarks with no self-pity on a chaotic journey of discovery and personal growth that will lead her to understand the freedom that comes with the acceptance of loss, loneliness and abandonment.The movie offers a finely observed character study of a strong and determined middle aged woman suddenly at a crossroad, struggling to rebuilt, reinvent, her life, finally free to embrace with open heart and arms the things to come. And accept, insecurities included, whatever the future or l’Avenir (the original French title) might bring her.At 35, Mia Hansen-Love, delivers her most deeply personal opus, inspired by her own parents’ divorce twelve years ago. “It is really the first film I do about the world I grew up in and it was a cathartic adventure,” admitting it took her while before feeling ready to grasp and tackle such a subject matter. Her mother was herself of a philosophy teacher who, coincidentally, once taught Huppert’s daughter Lolita Chammah, herself an actress!For her part, after more than hundred twenty films in a career that started in 1972, Isabelle Huppert at sixty-three demonstrates once more what a versatile and formidable actress she still is. Bringing to the part luminous poise, radiant optimism, infectious irony and self-deprecation in a role that was specifically written for her by Hansen-Love.