Does the future look something like the sea? The opening scene of Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come (its French title is simply L’Avenir, the future) ends with both protagonist and viewer looking out to the Brittany sea from Chateaubriand’s cliff-edge grave. Is the future like this? A prospect you can glance at once, like the tarot hand dealt at the beginning of Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962)? Or could its vastness – like the rest of nature, it cares little for us – be a comfort, like the hyperreal flash that concludes Eric Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert (1986)? A sea view has near-constant proportions, but ever-changing moods (think of the misty view of Balbec at the end of Marcel Proust’s Within a Budding Grove). You could drown in it.
Mia Hansen-Løve’s fifth film asks what we want of change: what it looks like, what it costs, what it can offer. Hansen-Løve’s films are often written from within: Eden (2014), her last, borrowed from her younger brother’s story of coming of age within the French electronica scene of the late nineties; Goodbye First Love (2011) drew from her own experiences of love and Bildung. She has talked of the story of Things to Come as being based on her parents’ divorce when she was in her twenties; her mother, when she read the script, asked only that the cat – a major character – be given a pseudonym.
Isabelle Huppert plays Nathalie, a prof de philo, subscriber to Le Monde and the New York Review of Books, in neat kick-flare indigo jeans and a silk shirt: we see her attending to her anxious mother, teaching those who have made it to class through a protest against the raising of the retirement age, paying for copies of her own book on Adorno at her publishing house, presenting a bowl of freshly washed strawberries at the end of lunch.
A friend saw the film before me and wrote: “Normally I’m all for bougie Frenchies in their €200 scarves getting in a tizz about their love lives and their philo classes, but this one really wasn’t on.” Things to Come has all the aesthetic pleasures – provocations to a teasing English eye – of watching Parisians. Does well-dressed sangfroid stop us from being able to sympathise with someone going through a divorce, the declining health of a parent and the erosion of her discipline? Or are we simply disappointed if an existential crisis is so undetectable as to barely merit the term? How flat do we want the future to be?
I wonder if my friend felt let down, in the first instance, by the confession of the husband’s betrayal: sitting calmly on the sofa, he explains he’s in love with someone else. “I thought you’d love me forever,” Nathalie replies. “What an idiot!” “I’ll always love you, Nathalie,” he says. She goes to get up: “Oh, arrête.” Instead of passion and infernal curiosity, there is restraint and numbness. The emotion is delayed, appearing in fits and bursts across the film, determinedly unfolding against any sort of smooth narrative arc. The scene made me remember all the times I’d not felt feelings at the right time: the two-year wait for anger, the four-year wait for tears of mourning (which then didn’t stop); the happiness only glimpsed in retrospect. Nathalie gloriously attempts to shove an expensive ball-like apology bouquet of peonies into her sleek metallic kitchen bin, and fails. No matter: she can fail better! She puts the stiff arrangement into an IKB-blue Ikea tote and leaves the whole thing in the communal dumpster in the basement. To belittle the peonies is to belittle the philanderer, but mutely, and if it were not for the camera, blindly. The door to the basement has been closed before she turns back, cracks the lid, and triumphantly rescues the blue bag.
Tizziness is missing. We glimpse betrayal once, from behind the municipal glass of a bus window. Nathalie is crying – nowhere finer to cry than on public transport, only a plane is better – when she sees him on the street with the young woman he left her for. Nathalie scoffs, shocked, but then laughs. Tizziness would belittle her too. He’s the cliché, she seems to get to say, without having to say it at all. Madame Bovary, c’est lui. He temporarily destroys the white peace of their book-lined apartment by removing his tomes and it’s at once comic – “He took my Levinas, with all my notes! And Buber too! Bastard! That’s too much!” – and tragic: the gap-toothed shelves show how their minds had grown together, over time, to the point that he forgets her notes weren’t his. He can’t see what he has lost, but she is starting to see what she has gained.
Nathalie’s life isn’t already written. Not by her ex-husband, not by Hollywood. She’s now sole author, and though she does know herself by now, she is also open to the future, unchosen as it is. But how to navigate? She accepts a drag of a cigarette from her most brilliant (and handsome) student, but she tells him she can’t imagine living with another man, young or old. She knows leaving the family’s summerhouse in Brittany, with the garden that has grown along with her children, will be hardest. She comes to her dying mother’s side to tempt her with After Eights, and ends up discussing not Sarkozy and Chirac’s policies but their respective sex appeal. Nathalie swerves from some clichés and bends towards others. What pattern could there be when life is newly patternless? The energy is not that of a racehorse bursting out of the gates but of a river meandering down a hill, to the sea. And we will be reminded, as The Fleetwoods’s version of ‘Unchained Melody’ plays over the credits, that lonely rivers flow to the sea. She takes a trip to visit her favourite student in his commune in the Vercors, and cries, without reserve, into the cat’s black fur. She tells her student of her luck: here she is, children grown, mother gone, husband with someone else. The freedom is total, unexpected and, therefore, extraordinary.
No, she doesn’t fuck the student. Or anyone else, as far as the film knows. Rather, she experiences love and hope in a multitude of other ways. She prowls her classroom, reading out a passage from Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse: “As long as we desire, we can do without happiness: we expect to achieve it. If happiness fails to come, hope persists, and the charm of illusion lasts as long as the passion that causes it. So this condition is sufficient in itself, and the anxiety it inflicts is a sort of enjoyment that compensates for reality… Woe to him who has nothing left to desire… We enjoy less what we obtain than what we hope for, and we are happy only before being happy.” In the last scene, it is Christmas, and her husband’s new nana has returned to her family in Spain; Nathalie is unwrapping a chicken from its wax paper to salt. He will spend Christmas with his books. In the living room, shelves replenished, are Nathalie’s son, daughter and son-in-law. Her infant grandson cries; Nathalie offers to go to him. With his tiny body over her shoulder, she holds his soft, lolling head in her hand and sings him a lullaby. ‘A la Claire Fontaine’ is a lament for lost love – she loses him not because she deserved it but because she wouldn’t surrender to him – but there is also a crystalline fountain, which is, as naturally and gently as the sea, ever-moving and ever-changing.
Joanna Biggs is a writer and editor at the London Review of Books, where she has reported on the student protest movement, the recession in Middlesbrough, Legal Aid cuts, censorship in China, and manufacturing. She is one of the founders of the feminist London-based publisher Silver Press.
