User Reviews

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.

I went to see the film, because I often like French films and also noticed that the rating at IMDb was not that bad.

When watching the film, I was expecting a turn of events that would give the film some meaning, but I expected in vain. Nothing such happened and I could not grasp why the film was made in the first place - perhaps only because it had received funding?

I gave the film 6 points out of 10, because the acting and filming was good and the characters in the film were sympathetic. However, the manuscript was weak and the director lacked vision.

I left the movie theater somewhat disappointed.

On one level this is yet another Master Class in Screen Acting delivered by Isabelle Huppert, long established as the Mistress of the Master Class, and if necessary I'll settle for that for we devotees of the sublime Huppert have long learned to endure her wayward choices which sometimes verge on the bizarre, in her career-long quest to both stretch herself as an actress whilst simultaneously giving a break to fledgling writers/directors. It would, of course, be churlish not to applaud someone who can select from the cream of writing/directing talent, and opts instead to lend her illustrious name to lesser talents but I, for one, wish she would 'discover' an Alexandra Leclerc (Les Soeurs Fachees) more often and give her admirers something entertaining. With Things To Come she has found something of a middle ground and in a movie in which nothing happens all at once she keeps us engrossed effortlessly.

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.

We had seen the same director's "Eden" two years ago, and frankly, if we had noticed that she directed this, we would have given it a miss. We saw it at the Toronto Film Festival.

Like "Eden," this is one of those movies that simply shows a person's life over some period of time. There is no moral, no point to the story (as far as I can see), very little humor (Isabelle Huppert was at the screening and said she tried to inject a bit of humor with her acting), and more than a bit pretentious (the director seemed to be in love with the final scene, although it left me cold).

I have a feeling this was, like "Eden," fairly autobiographical. The director's parents were both philosophy teachers, and I would have liked them to have commented on the movie--was this really about them? Is the director simply making a movie in the same way other people might talk about their parents to a therapist? I don't know.

My objection is that nothing much happens--either in terms of plot or in terms of involvement in the movie. Yes, her husband leaves her for another woman. Yes, she likes her former student, but there is not much passion in either situation. She doesn't seem to care, and neither did I. There are occasional long quotations from philosophers, and maybe this would have made everything more comprehensible, but the quotations were quite long, and hard to follow with subtitles. Even so, you shouldn't need a quotation to make sense of a movie.

It's hard to believe Isabelle Huppert is 63 years old. Here she plays Nathalie Chazeaux, a Parisian philosophy professor who suddenly faces a mid-life crisis. The screenplay is by writer/director Mia Hansen-Løve who has served up quite a convincing portrait of a sophisticated academic and the world she inhabits. If only Hansen-Løve paid as much attention to her plot as she did with dialogue, then this might have ended up as a certifiable masterpiece. Alas, like many films these days, it just wasn't meant to be.

Nonetheless, in the early going, Things to Come has great promise. Huppert's Nathalie is a bundle of energy who stands up to student protesters who attempt to intimidate her students by blocking them from entering the campus and taking her class. Then there are a couple of young book publishers who would like Nathalie to re-write her textbook since it's no longer selling well. She not only resists the re-write but opposes a sleek new design they rather untactfully advocate.

Nathalie also must deal with an aging mother who calls the fire department whenever she has a panic attack. Some have pegged her a hypochondriac but as the narrative plays out, her actual health condition is decidedly quite poor and before you know it Nathalie and the rest of her family are attending a funeral.

The break into the second act occurs when Nathalie's daughter confronts her father with the knowledge that he's been having an affair, and demands that he either stay with her mother or leave her for the other woman. The husband named Heinz (André Marcon) is also a professor but a bit of a wet fish who decides to leave Nathalie, prompting the aforementioned mid-life crisis.

At this juncture, one prepares for some unexpected or perhaps suspenseful things to happen with Nathalie, but sadly they never come. Much is made of Nathalie's relationship with her former student, Fabien, who retreats to the mountains and lives with a small commune of anarchists who also happen to be graduate or former graduate students. On her first visit to see Fabien after the breakup with her husband, Nathalie is most concerned about her house cat who has wandered off into the woods. Fabien reassures her that the cat will return out of "instinct," and Fabien's promise foreshadows the direction Nathalie ultimately takes in response to the new path she's forced to take in life.

If you're expecting some sparks to fly between Nathalie and Fabien, you will be disappointed. A few blunt words are exchanged after Fabien finds Nathalie too bourgeois for his tastes but the anarchist and former professor seem to get along despite their divergent political pathways.

Nothing happens between Nathalie and her ex-husband either except for Nathalie giving him a continual cold shoulder after he leaves her for the other woman. Nathalie's anger is understandable but she chooses not to look for a new man since she asserts she's too set in her ways at this point to make a new relationship work. Casual sex is also out of the question especially after a creep follows her out of a movie theater and boorishly plants a kiss on her lips right out on the streets.

Things to Come is best described as a "slice of life," but even the most basic of dramas need some kind of twist that takes us out of the ordinary (albeit for at least a single moment of enlightenment or epiphany). Here Hansen-Løve is content to have her protagonist reject a new direction and embrace the mundane. Indeed Nathalie follows her "instinct" by becoming a good grandmother, upon the birth of her first grandchild.

For some critics Hansen-Løve's sophistry is wrapped up in the narrative's "subtlety." Others may find that subtlety is simply a code word for lack of clever plotting—leading to a fitful conclusion that character arcs should never be associated with the moniker of the mundane.

This, for me, is a film about becoming lost but needing to find a way back to connection with the world and your purpose.

A philosophy teacher disconnected from her job is confronted by her husband announcing he is leaving her for another women. Shortly afterwards we see her committing her elderly mother to a care home and subsequently inheriting her mother's cat. She claims to be allergic to the cat- I think this is poignant for her later transformation. Later on her mother dies and she finds herself lost, confused, upset and puzzled by the meaning of everything around her

She goes to stay with her former student Fabian in the french countryside. After being picked up at the train station by him she tells him this is the first time she has truly been free- her mother has gone, her children have left home and her husband as left her. She seems to sigh with an aura of bliss but with a bitter sweet ambience of helplessness.

She brings her cat along on her little trip and the cat disappears into the wilderness and she spends the evening shouting into the abyss for her. The next morning when the cat returns she is overwhelmed with relief as her cat presents a freshly caught mouse for her, strangely cuddling the cat (Pandora) without showing signs of any allergy. That cat that she was fed up with and saw as a nuisance is her saviour. She needs to find purpose and meaning in her world that has dissipated before her eyes.

We see at the end of the film after she has prepared dinner at Christmas for her family her grandson is crying in the bedroom. Her daughter- the new mother- gets up to see to him- but the now grandmother tells her she will see to him...then comforts him in her arms and roll the credits.

Some may see this as a collection of very well acted, realist scenes exploring relationships between her and the people she encounters but deeper I feel the film is about the need to find purpose and when this disappears it can be found in the strangest of places - including a cat you're allergic too!

"L'avenir" is a French(language) movie from this year (2016) and these 100 minutes are the most recent work by fairly young French writer and director Mia Hansen-Løve. From start to finish, it is a showpiece for established actress Isabelle Huppert and she plays a teacher, who struggles with her marriage, with her family, with her work and with life in general. We see her at her job quickly and find out these are tumultuous times. But this profession-related thing is just one aspect and afterward we never see her at school again, which surprised me a bit. Instead we watch her struggle with her cheating husband and with the way she tries to adapt to the life of one of her protégés. This was also one of the film's weaknesses. Firstly I found the actor who plays the latter extremely bland and forgettable, which was a deal-breaker in the negative sense as he plays possibly the biggest supporting character. Then also, the way the film tried to make us curious if there will be a romantic relationship between the two felt fairly cringeworthy and clumsy and the film really delivered in very few other areas beyond that suspense. The whole way the romance and attraction aspect was written in here was not to my liking. The attempts of the filmmaker to describe Huppert as a strong-willed and attractive yet very fragile women felt extremely false and generic to me. There are moments when the film has sub-par television level at best and as a whole it was disappointing for a big screen release. The weakest moment of the film was probably the cinema scene, which added absolutely nothing except the fact that they wanted to make sure we don't forget how desirable Huppert('s character) was. The cat scenes and the solid ending could not really make up for all the flaws in this film. France is definitely among the most creative countries right now when it comes to filmmaking, both quality and quantity, but this film of slightly over 1.5 hours we have here adds very little (almost nothing) in that regard. I also found Huppert underwhelming, even if she obviously suffers from the generic way her character was written. It's not a question of how likable her character is eventually. It is more about the fact that in this film there is nothing she hasn't done before and usually she's done it way better. Quite a disappointment and I give "Things to Come" a thumbs-down. Not recommended.