Things to Come

“Why can’t time get it wrong?” a high school student asks Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert), the philosophy teacher protagonist of Mia Hansen-Løve’s newest picture.

Set in a Paris of civil political unrest, echoing the events of May 1968, the film follows the life of Nathalie as she deals with a depressed mother (Édith Scob), a separation from her husband (André Marcon) and a student occupation at her workplace.

Hansen-Løve delicately directs the progress of the woman’s life in an impeccable and tactful manner; the film is a visual representation of the passage of time and an illustration of its unrestrainable nature. Every book, every film and every philosopher mentioned is not a casual coincidence – in some way, they all connect to Nathalie’s life and give an answer, an explanation or a subtle parallel to her own personal experience. From Rousseau to Schopenhauer, the philosophy recurrent in the plot provides a key for the interpretation of the film.

Hansen-Løve reminds us, with an elegance and exquisiteness rarely observable in modern pictures, of the unperturbed apathy of time in front of our daily struggles; it exposes our itching desire for more time in the moments of our life in which we are most overwhelmed by its continuous motion, and yet our lack of power over its flow.

The result, other than visually ravishing, is one of the most human films of the decade, which forces the viewer’s eyes to linger on the screen even after its end.

Marta Meazza