By the thirty-minute mark of Things to Come, Mia Hansen-Løve has constructed an overwhelmingly intricate theater of conflict for Isabelle Huppert’s certain-aged Nathalie. Student protests, a stifling professional bureaucracy, senile mother with failing health, and disgustingly-casual marital infidelity––all make up the familiar architecture of middle-age. Yet composing its delicate center is the ever graceful Huppert, alongside her considerate director. Their marriage of direction and translation creates a unique cinematic alchemy thick with empathy and truth.
Without a doubt Things to Come is the most wonderfully felt film of the year, “felt” being the operative word. With a patient eye, Hansen-Løve brings to surface life’s emotional textures. Because the conflict, though major, is understated, it integrates seamlessly into life’s rhythms. Resolution is subtle, almost lulling. First principles are read literally on screen as Nathalie, a philosophy professor, grades a paper whose thesis reads “Can we put ourselves in the place of the other?”. The rest of the film answers that question by its fullness of complexity. Nathalie’s life bears down upon the frame but without heavy-handed point-making. The immediacy isn’t situational; it’s born through personhood. We’re taught through footsteps, not through tears. Hansen-Løve layers milieu like petals of a flower. Nathalie is actualized through a thick emotional, geographical, social, relational texture.
The elemental cohesion of this world brought to mind another work of similar specificity, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 film Masculin Feminin. Both are envisioned through certain relational and social textures, evocations of eras and environments in certain individuals’ lives. Where Godard is interested in 60s Parisian youth culture, Hansen-Love crafts a portrait of middle age in 21st century Paris. Their essentials mirror one another—societal disarray amongst younger generations, philosophizing as relational construction, dense observations of milieu, a quasi-docu aesthetic—but its the opposing perspectives from which these worlds are observed that forms their intertexuality into an arc mimicking life itself. Things to Come plays as a series of closing doors to Masculin Feminin’s lively uncertainties. The impassioned vigor and opportunity of Godard’s film has congealed into circumstance in the 50 years it takes to get to Hansen-Løve’s work.
Young romances find stoppage in middle-age’s half-hearted unfaithfulness. Latchkey youth, once proud of social independence, is reflected back as horror through the loss of a parent. Intellectual ascendancy which saw itself wont to threaten the powers-that-be soon is a commodity stripped away by the system. Things to Come is about the places we end up. It serves as a stabilizing work for the audacious formal and thematic assertions of Godard’s portrait of a culture. Time yields a wider breadth of perspective, and, ultimately, wisdom. Nathalie’s world has been constructed and restrained by a confluence of her own volition and environmental circumstance. Middle-age shows a life engrained into society’s machinations, whereas youth in Masculin Feminin seems to assert itself as the shaping force of the world. (I’d not argue that Godard actually agrees with his young there.)
Nathalie realizes that in order to find peace she must collaborate with circumstance; you must reckon with the world you are handed. While her losses are earth-shattering, it’s her sureness of self set against gaping vulnerabilities which enables her to navigate the wreckage. And Hansen-Løve recognizes that Huppert is everything here. Few actors command compositions the way she does. As the film tracks alongside Nathalie’s quest for peace and stability, Huppert plays the ballerina in time to her director’s careful adagio. The film becomes less a cataclysm than a metamorphosis of circumstance. In her performance, Huppert demands not to lose step with dignity. Her poise is an acknowledged outlook, one shaped by wisdom and knowledge. Nathalie, the philosophy professor, takes what knowledge most of her ilk would use as mere superficial rigor, and becomes the grace it takes to navigate theory and thought. And thus, she is steadfast in self even when those constructs which formed her fall around her feet.
In one scene, as Nathalie seeks respite with an old student and his group of rural anarchist intellectuals, she sits around a farm table as the young and mostly male group discusses their latest philosophical project. When the question of authorship arises, each acknowledges it best that this remain a collective project: no one is to ascribe their name to any essay, tract, idea. How, after all, can an individual claim anything as originally theirs? Hansen-Løve observes patiently, as does Huppert. She’s interested inasmuch as her mentor/maternal nature lends. When Nathalie walks in to the kitchen, one of the women asks what she thinks about the subject. Nathalie says she’s too old for radicalizing, that she has changed. The woman replies that yet the world is still the same. It’s a scene of shifting perspectives, like an osmosis of time and experience. To the youthful, Nathalie’s mutability is detrimental, but to her, it’s survival.
Material like this typically leans too much into a sort-of existential bleakness which suffocates viewers into a mutated type of empathy. And so less-skilled directors have crafted a dense history of clichés from the milieu of middle-age. And when the ills are that oppressive, the craftsmanship follows suit. That sort of clinical nihilism doesn’t seek to give anything to its audience; there, we can only remain spectators of misery, hoping we won’t walk into the same on the way home from the theater. In proposing a composed, graceful navigation through life’s eventual ills, Mia Hansen-Løve and Isabelle Huppert bring dignity to a group who has come to identify with loss and deterioration.
As it ends, a meditative, tender rendition of “Unchained Melody” plays. The camera slowly tracks backward out of Nathalie’s apartment. The frame is tinged warm, like a renewed, gilded vision of life. That crumbling space has been remade.
Oh, my love, my darling
I’ve hungered for your touch
A long lonely time
And time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
The patient measures Mia Hansen-Løve takes to craft this careful portrait are a gift. She affirms time’s work in our lives by displaying a life as full of slow-churning yet massive tides of upheaval and recession. This makes us the people we are. Things to Come is a hopeful vision of true empathy, earned and not manufactured. It gives where other works seek to take.