7pm Sunday 12th April 2026
l’avenir 2016 (12A)
Things To Come
Director: mia hansen-løve
Run Time 1h 42mins
A terrific film, utterly real, that involves you emotionally and intellectually.
Isabelle Hupert is note-perfect in this moving account of a philosophy teacher spiralling through a series of late-life crises. We meet her character, Nathalie Chazeaux, en-route to the tidal island of Grand Bé off Brittany, earnestly discussing the visual quality of music with her husband, Heinz (André Marcon). At the grave of the 19th Century writer and politician Chateaubriand, Heinz lingers by the lonely sea view while his family scamper ahead, warning of an incoming tide. It’s a sunny family scene, but one with a portentous air. Jumping ahead several years we meet Nathalie in Paris, where protests are preventing her students from attending class, to the annoyance of the one-time communist; “just for three years, like most intellectuals”. When Heinz taunts her about her shifting politics, Nathalie scornfully replies that he hasn’t changed his since he was 18.
Yet Heinz has a secret that will prove that love is even less certain than politics or philosophy. “I thought you’d love me forever,” says Nathalie, ruefully. “What an idiot.
Hansen-Løve serves up unapologetic discussions of Rousseau, radicalism and revolution in a world in which the Unabomber’s manifesto sits side by side with the classics and clerics declare that “doubt and questioning are inextricably bound up with faith”. It sounds unbearably heavy, but there is such life in the character of Nathalie, partly inspired by the director’s mother, that this often turns to levity and laughter.
Crucially, if unfashionably in Cinéma these days, Nathalie’s profession is central to her existence. Beyond her marital problems Nathalie’s primary relationship is with her books, and one of the film’s most harrowing scenes shows her once tightly packed bookshelves riddled with gaping holes after a domestic cull leaves her beloved books lying on their sides.
At the same time Nathalie must answer the constant cries for help from her mother, with Edith Scob superbly querulous as the former model whose ambitions and anxieties have been bequeathed to her daughter, along with her overweight cat, Pandora. As a daughter and a mother Nathalie fulfils a dual role that is threatened at the same moment that her husband proves inconstant. Yet rather than looking for a trite romantic “solution” to her isolation -there’s a frisson of attraction with her protege, Fabien, seductively played by Roman Kolinka – the film keeps Nathalie on the move, the camera constantly catching her striding here and there as briskly as the film itself. Her character is involved in a constant arc, an ongoing flow of life in which the future is waiting to be written.
Trailer for L’Avenir/Things To Come
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