Paul Allaer "Things to Come" (2016 release from France; original title "L'Avenir" (The Future); 100 min.) brings the story of Nathalie, As the movie opens, we see Nathalie and her family visiting the burial site of Chateaubriand at St. Malo in Brittany. We then go to "Some Years Later", and Nathalie and her husband Heinz, both lyceum teachers, are dealing with various student protests against "the reform", much to their irritation. In a parallel story, Nathalie needs to deal with her aging mother, who seemingly calls her every 5 minutes regarding an ailment (real or perceived). At this point we are 10 min. into the movie but to tell you more of the plot would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.Couple of comments: this is the latest movie from French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve, best known for the excellent "Father of My Children" some years ago. Here she brings to the big screen a seemingly ordinary slice of life about a women in her late fifties, dealing with changes around her: her aging mom, issues at school, issues with her husband, issues with her schoolbook publishing company, etc. etc. No bomb explosions, no special effects, no car chases, just people interacting and living their lives. The first hour of the movie plays out in Paris, and makes day-to-day life in Paris look fantastic: mostly sunny weather, people playing in the park, people enjoying a coffee on a sidewalk terrace, etc. (Having grown up in nearby Belgium, I can assure you that in reality the weather is rarely that nice...) The rests of the movie plays out at the family's summer house in Brittany, and also in the Rhone mountains. But the very best part of the movie is of course to watch Isabelle Huppert in action. In my mind, Huppert is the European Meryl Streeo (they are about the same age), and Huppert seemingly is only getting better as she's getting older (just like Streep). Here Huppert brings the Nathalie character with a vulnerability yet an equal amount of determination. In one of her classes, she asks the students "can the established truth be debated?" Later on, she concludes that "the future is compromised"."Things to Come" won major acclaim when it premiered at the Berlin film festival last year, and rightfully so. As it happens, Huppert released another film last year, "Elle", that won her even greater acclaim. It's tough when you're competing against yourself. "Things to Come" opened this weekend at my local art-house theater here in Cincinnati (the same theater where "Elle" is still showing, coincidentally). The Sunday matinée screening where I saw this at was packed, to my surprise. I guess the word is out that basically any film starring Isabelle Huppert is almost certainly a must-see, and that certainly is the case here. "Things to Come" is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

antcol8 If this movie could have lived up to all of the ideas it flirts with and all of the things it proposes, it could have been a masterpiece. But it didn't, so it isn't. But, look, I actually don't care so much. Why not? Because Isabelle Huppert is incredible. I don't really follow actors much. I'm more of a classic "Auteurist", trained by Sarris' American Cinema. But Isabelle...She is a phenomenon. You can feel her intelligence in every shot; you can feel her thinking. And she maintains a remarkable girlishness, even in her sixties. Isabelle...OK, enough of that!But a film which engages with the desperate search for new paradigms of Resistance and Revolution...A film which brings in a Zizek reference right on cue, in a non - name dropping kind of way. This is a film which matters - or which could matter, if the look was not so French Lifetime Channel. I mean, I know I'm showing my age if I say that I would like a film which engages with ideas to also engage with them on the level of Film Grammar. I mean, Adorno's Minima Moralia (referenced several times) is Adorno for Beginners - the film coulda reflected that work on some kind of structural level, at least a LITTLE bit, without losing the audience. At least I think so! Or hope so...I would've hoped for something on the level of Godard's La Chinoise, but the film is closer to Tanner's Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. But, for 2016, that's pretty good...pretty good. Anyway, it's hip for French directors to turn their backs on Godard now - I heard Desplechin announce (with pride) that he had moved from Godard to Truffaut. Well, if My Golden Years is any indication, it's not a good move...Things to Come is not a great film. But it is filled with lots of Little Beauties. I loved the Woody Guthrie scene. Especially how actor Roman Kolinka really nails Woody's nuances, albeit with a Gallic lilt. All of the references - literary, musical - are note - perfect and done with excellent taste. But - (Tl;dr) - all this really proves is that French Middlebrow Culture is closer to Highbrow Culture than American Middlebrow Culture is.

geltner The pace of the film is very slow and at times boring. The story is slow to appear and the ending is unsatisfactory. There were some discussions of philosophy which I found murky. The acting and casting seems fine. The plot is that of a middle aged woman who's husband leaves her for a younger woman. She seems not to suspect anything beforehand and we see some of her emotional response. The depiction of the lifestyle of an intellectual family in Paris is interesting but the lives of the two children are poorly developed which, I imagine, is purposeful. The director seems to want a laser focus on the main character, Isabel Hubert. She is a fine actress and plays the part with style.Overall, it is just not enough of a plot, not enough action, to keep the interest of the viewer. I wish we could see more french films here in the USA since I'm a fan of french cinema, in general.

maurice yacowar The Donovan song's tension between seeking an impossible purity and living a deep peace establishes the film's central theme and heroine Isabel's primary virtue. She lives a live of immediate, accepting presence. She won't be tempted by shallow rewards or depressed by disappointments. She embodies the strength and resilience of the examined life. As the Rousseau quote declares, desire is the enemy of happiness. Our failed satisfactions are based upon the desire for something new — which, once achieved, no longer satisfies. Isabel has lived through the political temptations of her time, from her flirtation with communism through the '68 revolution. So she's not tempted by the current students' strike for pensions or her star ex-student Fabien's anarchism. In contrast, her husband stays stuck in the attitudes he held at 18 and has the rigidity and insensitivity to tyrannize his students. Isabel finds real value and fulfilment in teaching philosophy to her high school students, training them to think for themselves and taking an interest in their lives. She has a stoic response to her publishers' initial insistence on jazzing up her textbooks, then suspending their publication altogether. Her integrity won't allow her to abandon her values. She has the dignity and self-respect to accept their abandonment with aplomb. That also sustains her through her husband's abandonment for a younger woman. As briskly as Isabel cuts loose from him she ends her connection to his family's country home where they vacationed every summer and where she planned and cultivated her garden. In all their scenes together she conducts herself with strength and an absolute rejection of self-pity. This self-sufficiency supports her when she visits Fabien's mountain retreat and when her fragile yet demanding mother dies. A scene with an importunate stranger at a cinema shows her refusal to seek carnal reaffirmation. Her grandson's birth shows her instead embracing the role of grandmother, fully and warmly. In the last scene Isabel hosts a Christmas dinner with her children. To let her daughter eat, Isabel goes to tend to the crying baby, stilling him with yet another song. With the family dinner framed out of the shot on the left and Isabel and the infant framed out on the right, the shot focuses on the shelves of books between them. The film is about the use of those books, i.e., the traditional function of philosophy — detached from the fashions of the day in pedagogy or politics — to address the one essential question: How should we live our life? Aptly, the last song is "Unchained Melody," which turns an exultation in freedom into a love song. The Schubert song and the Woody Guthrie ballad both provide imagery of transcending the mundane reality by discovering the ethereal around it. The other characters live to pursue new pleasures, which inevitably fail to satisfy them. The husband's new woman has left him alone for Christmas, apparently not yet ready to introduce him to her family. Fabien and his German friends debate the political uses of anonymity or the collective authorship (i.e., the death of the author or the personal, a recently fashionable fiction). Isabel's daughter has wanted a baby but at the tension between her parents dissolves into tears and needs to hold him again. As if he will give her the stability she lost through her father's infidelity. The preacher similarly cites Isabel's career as a philosophy teacher to be the proper justification for her mother's life of pain, isolation and abandonment. And then there is Pandora. This is the obese, willful, all-black cat that Isabel inherits from her mother, is allergic to and impatient with, and finally leaves at Fabien's retreat. Far from the traditional Pandora, who unleashed the world's evil winds, this one is a minor key replay of Isabel's themes. Pampered by Isabel's mother, Pandora hides from whoever else enters her mistress's flat. She's heavy to carry, like the unwanted burdens we all have periodically thrust upon us. But like Isabel she has a feral intelligence and instinct. This house cat takes off into the forest but has the instincts to survive and find her way home in the morning, bringing her new mistress back a dead mouse. In her instinctual survival and her integrity the cat is another reflection of our wise, warm and worldly philosopher. The film is titled L'Avenir, "the future." Written and directed by a woman, it offers a real rarity: a heroine of intellect, will and strength. That's a refreshing new kind of superhero.