Things to Come (2016)

Very Cool!!!

Thanks for the memories!

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert) is a Parisian high-school philosophy teacher in her sixties. She seems to have an ideal family life. Her husband Heinz (André Marcon) also teaches philosophy at the same school and they have a content family life at home with their two young adult children. As the film progresses, life situations becomes less ideal for Nathalie including the mental and physical decline of her high-maintenance mother (Edith Scob).The film's beginning was fascinating. It included school protests against the current state of France; it also included a disagreement Nathalie has with a pair of marketing experts on how her book, written years ago, should be packaged to sell better. These scenes seemed to promise a critique of our modern times. While those themes more or less dissipated after the beginning, "Things to Come" remains an insightful film at other levels.Yet again, Huppert raises the film to a higher level with her talent and presence portraying a role with which many in her life situation could identify. She seems strangely cool when given bad news but her humanity (and tears) show more clearly when she is alone.This coolness is especially apparent in her final scene with Marcon. It is amazing how both seem to be having a casual conversation but there is so much bite and sadness in the subtext beneath their words. This scene is quite remarkable.Director/writer Mia Hansen-Love presents her fine story free of any flash. Sometimes, this subtlety is welcome but this movie might have used just a little more flash to heighten a few scenes. But with such a fine lead player, Hansen-Love might have found this unnecessary. The bonus is the various philosophical discussions (including talk of the events around the 1968 uprising) which Nathalie has with her husband, her classes at school, and a former prized student who now lives in an anarchist commune in the countryside.

The French film L'avenir was shown in the U.S. with the title Things to Come (2016). It was written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve.The movie stars Isabelle Huppert as Nathalie Chazeaux, a gifted philosophy professor and textbook author. She has an happy life, with a loving husband and two loving children. She has a burden as well--her mother suffers from dementia, and will soon have to be placed in a nursing home. In a matter of days, things start to turn sour for Nathalie, and that's where the plot begins.The plot takes Nathalie from her beautiful home in Paris, to a vacation home in Brittany, to a rural farming commune. Each of these locations is beautifully photographed. Because of the wonderful scenery, the movie will work better on a large screen. (We saw it at the excellent Little Theatre in Rochester, NY.) Still, it's such a superb film, that if you can't see it in a theater, see it on the small screen.All the supporting actors do a good job, and each is believable. However, all of them could be interchanged with other actors who have same level of ability. No one could replace Huppert. She is so talented, intelligent, attractive, and graceful that she was made to play this role. Without her, the movie might not work. With her, it's masterful. This film is too good to miss!P.S. The only other actor to match Huppert's level of talent and grace is Pandora, the cat. Pandora is old, and she has been pampered, but when she needs to catch a mouse, she catches a mouse.

Until this movie I never quite got the hype for Mia Hansen-Løve. Her slice-of-life, semi- autobiographical movies seemed forgettable to me. Maybe Hansen-Løve is growing as an artist, or maybe it's just Huppert. Whatever it is, Things to Come, is a movie that's stuck in my mind, a beautiful portrait of a woman whose life is upended just as she is entering the final third of her life. The great French actress Isabelle Huppert plays Nathalie (based on Hansen-Løve's own mother). A successful philosophy professor with two grown children, a fellow philosopher for a husband, and an ailing mother, she is comfortably settled in her life. But as the movie continues on we watch as the things that Nathalie considered so much a part of her, change, dissolve, disintegrate. I'll admit it, I was actually initially reluctant to watch the movie because the idea of seeing a woman having everything taken away from her seemed almost too sad to bear. And yet Things to Come is a surprisingly joyful movie. Nathalie isn't an automaton, she cries as the things she once counted on as part of her life are no more, but at the same time she picks herself up, dusts herself off and goes on.

The efficiency of "L'avenir" has in Isabelle Huppert your vital point. If her Nathalie had been given to an actress with less recourse, and she did not have the passion and delivery that Huppert has, we would have a movie out of tune. Fortunately we have Huppert,and here her talents is always added. First to a excellent screenplay, that creates believable and interesting situations, developing the film with many doses of realism, and very calmly and interested. The supporters are very good too, and the direction is excellent, flowing in an incredible way. Is subtle, investigative, never exhibitionist, and is placed as the eyes of the audience, always observing the actions and reactions that fall about your lead. The results is a picture interested and interesting, intellectualized but not snobby, about a ordinary person and ordinary situations (although shocking), and never (thank you!) loses the focus of dazzle that is Isabelle Huppert.