Berlin Film Festival 2016 – Things to Come, review: Above all, a great performance by Isabelle Huppert

This is among the very best films ever made about the lives of intellectuals, says David Sexton
A film about the lives of intellectuals: L'Avenir
David Sexton15 February 2016

Things to Come (an offputtingly H G Wells-evoking translation of a film that in French is called simply L'Avenir) is the fifth feature by the gifted 35-year old director, Mia Hansen-Love.

Her last, Eden, modelled on the career of her brother, was about the dilemmas faced by a 20-something club DJ. Indeed, until now she has made pretty much semi-autobiographical films, about people of more or less her own age, still so young for an acclaimed auteur. L'Avenir, though, looks to the future, to age.

Hansen-Love, who began as a teenage actress in films directed by Olivier Assayas, went on both to be mentored by him as a film-maker and to marry him - and they have a six-year-old daughter. Assayas himself, although still making lush films about youthful radicality such as Something in the Air and Clouds of Sils Maria, is 61 - and, as it happens, this marvellous new film by Hansen-Love is about facing up to both the freedoms granted and the loss of choice involved in becoming older.

It's also and equally a film about the lives of intellectuals, people who live by ideas above all, among the very best films ever made about that subject, so difficult to incorporate into action. She knows the subject intimately, being not only French, for such a way of approaching life is deeply engrained in French thinking and habit even among those not regaling themselves in central Paris, but also in herself being the daughter of two philosophy professors.

L'Avenir stars Isabelle Huppert, no less, now 62, the first time Hansen-Love has worked with an actress of such fame. They have brought out the best in each other very movingly for anybody (OK, me) who first fell for Huppert in The Lacemaker back in 1977.

She plays Nathalie, a confident, thin and chic, intellectually incisive philosophy professor, with several textbooks to her name, married to Heinz (Andre Marcon), a far more conservative philosophy teacher (he reveres Schopenhauer, not Marx) with a bit of a tum and a slightly grumpy attitude, but they share both a lovely old, beachside family holiday home in Brittany as well a stylish book-lined apartment in Paris, and they have a teenage son and a daughter, close to each other if not quite the major intellectuals they are themselves.

The only fly in the ointment, it first appears, is Nathalie's narcissistic, wildly demanding mother, a beauty in her youth but now a prize pain in the arse, hilariously well played by the 78-year-old veteran actress of stage and screen, Edith Scob (so good in Asssayas's Summer Hours).

Nathalie is losing it all: her husband, her growing children, the contracts for her over-serious textbooks, that holiday house – and her mother. "The future seems compromised", she says.

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This mother rings Nathalie incessantly, if necessary to get her attention telling her that she has turned the gas on and is committing suicide. When Natalie rushes over yet again, abandoning her class, which is cogently discussing "can the truth be debated?", she finds her mother is fine - but the firemen her mother is called are fed up. "Three times this week for nothing - your mother is your responsility - put her in hospital" one tells her. The mother, meanwhile, says "the fireman was cute" and "I'm dying of cold - can I have my mink." Later, when she is refusing food, in the expensive old people's home Nathalie has arranged, she demands strawberries and oysters, once her daughter has come back abandoning her final visit to her beloved Breton hideway. Edith Scob's comic delivery is perfect, as a once-commanding woman who has not coped at all with abandonment and ageing: a great cameo, a great foil for Huppert.

Then, after 25 years, Hein gravely tells Nathalie: "I met someone." Her faultlessly French response? "Why tell me?" But then Heinz says he is moving in with the other woman. "I thought you would love me forever – what an idiot", Nathalie, ever clear-minded, says of herself. They split the books, Nathalie enraged Heinz has confiscated her annotated copies of Levinas, he perturbed not to be able to find The World as Will and Representation.

Nathalie – although unwillingly gaining her mother's cat, Pandora, which apart from being huge anyway, a Depardieu of cats, is actually obese, a cardinal sin around Huppert – is losing it all: her husband, her growing children, the contracts for her over-serious textbooks, that holiday house – and her mother. "The future seems compromised", she says.

At her mother's funeral service, a priest tells her artlessly: "Doubt and questioning are bound up with faith - you have made this your life." But she has been so certain until now - and in her address at the family farewell, she tellingly reads from Pascal, who says he is to be pitied for his uncertainty: "Nature should say everything or nothing... ignorant of what I am or of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty..."

"After 40, women are fit for the trash", Nathalie tells her protege, a radicalised young writer and teacher, Fabien (Roman Kolinka). But Fabien too is leaving, to join a radical philosophical commune in remote countryside of the mountainous Vercors.

Nathalie, putting the best face on events ("I discovered my freedom") visits him there but finds she is "too old for radicality". Her brief three years of communism ended when she read Solzhenitsyn, as she has already crisply explained. But Fabien turns on her for living as such a bourgeois – "a thought system requires a change in life", he says. Although rebutting these "sterile schemas", Nathalie is wounded, hugging the great lump Pandora to herself, in tears.

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A year later, though, she is setting her class a pointedly challenging text from Rousseau's novel, Julie: "So long as we desire, we can go without happiness..."

At Christmas, Heinz calls by to collect his book – "Now that you have your Schopenhauer, all is well", she says, with almost forgiving sarcasm. She cradles her crying new grandchild, softly singing a lullaby: "A nightingale sang/ Your heart is full of joy..."

Above all, L'Avenir is a great performance by Huppert, on screen almost from start to finish, as a woman re-thinking her whole life so late, so assertive, but also so vulnerable and tender, totally holding your heart yet also convincing you as one of those strange creatures, a thorough-going academic, in a way rarely seen.

Thoroughly, even densely, written though it is, a variant moreover on a not wholly unfamiliar story of break-up and survival, the film nonetheless flows like a river with true cinematic life. You can't mistake it. The camerawork by Denis Lenoir (who works for Assayas too but in a different mode) is always engaged and involving, not to say actually emotive in its own movements.

L'Avenir could only ever have been made in France, by a film-maker who has deeply absorbed la nouvelle vague and all its values and has given them natural expression for today. Without any disrespect to Joanna Hogg, whose films are stunning achievements too, L'Avenir has an ease with its high-flown yet completely grounded subject matter no English film-maker knows. So far, this has been, for me, the best that 2016 Berlin Film Festival has had to show.

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