Skip this review if you’re sick of hearing about the wonderfulness of Isabelle Huppert. Always good, she’s gasp-inducing here as a Parisian intellectual.
Though cynical about most things, Nathalie assumes her husband will always be loyal and that her adult children, along with her frail mother, will always need her. As Nathalie discovers the error of her erudite ways, she suffers. And Mia Hansen-Love’s precise script, perfectly in tune with Huppert’s methods, works like a sharp knife, gently able to slip between our ribs. From out of nowhere, or so it seems, our insides get ripped in two.
Several recent films have charted the distress felt by middle-aged women when their long-term partners start a new life. Where The Commune seemed almost to gloat over its heroine’s misery, Learning to Drive mopped up said misery too neatly. Things to Come, full of philosophical wrangling and direct quotes (from Rousseau), gets the balance just right.
No one here has all the answers. We’re encouraged to chuckle at the lifestyle choices of Nathalie, her husband and even her former student Fabian (Roman Kolinka), a would-be revolutionary who thinks he and his girlfriend have risen above petty, bourgeois concerns. All the characters tether themselves to existence via lovers, children, grandchildren or pets. And we have to decide for ourselves whether that’s a recipe for loneliness or bliss.
A running theme, by the way, concerns the difficulty of aligning understatement with commercial success. Things to Come deserves to make wads of cash. Yet you can imagine Nathalie muttering, with a whip-quick shrug, “Ne compte pas trop la-dessus!” (don’t bank on it).
Cert 12A, 100 mins
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