L'Avenir (2016)
Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

Film Review

Life as a continuing process of renewal and rediscovery is the theme that director Mia Hansen-Løve has made central to her oeuvre.  In her earlier films (Tout est pardonné, Le Père de mes enfants, Un amour de jeunesse), the writer-director's protagonists have been young women negotiating a difficult passage in their lives (relationship breakdown, bereavement, adolescence).  In L'Avenir, her fifth film (a worthy winner of the Best Director award at the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival), Hansen-Løve progresses to a more mature woman, one in her late fifties, and convinces us that no one is too old or too set in their way to completely reinvent themselves.  We don't stop growing just because we get old. 

The central character of Nathalie (apparently inspired by the director's own mother) provides a made-to-measure role for Isabelle Huppert, an actress who has never ceased to develop and surprise in a career that (incredibly) already comprises over a hundred screen roles.  Hansen-Løve's understated, down-to-earth but nuanced screenplay allows Huppert the opportunity to create one of her more credible and humane characters, whilst showing what a remarkably subtle actress she is.  If tonally L'Avenir is a thing of extreme contrasts - trepidation and release, mourning and celebration, loss and discovery - that are magically brought together by Hansen-Løve's deft writing and mise-en-scène, then so is Huppert's tour de force performance.  In one crucial scene, Nathalie is seen quietly crying whilst taking a bus ride, but then she suddenly breaks into laughter upon glimpsing her husband with his mistress in the street.  It is as if, in her darkest moment, someone has just flashed a torchlight in her face.  Her marriage may be over but in its place there is a whole new life opening up before her, richer and freer than she has ever known.

And we only have to compare the two halves of the film to see how dramatically altered Huppert's character is by the two events that bring about her transformation - the failure of her marriage and the death of her aged mother (Edith Scob at her finest).  In the first part of the film, Nathalie has constructed a perfect world for herself as a dull bourgeois intellectual with a dull bourgeois husband and a Parisian apartment that looks more like a library than a home.  Although politically engaged in her youth, she has long given up trying to change the world and instead she now devotes herself to improving young minds through her teaching and writing.  In twenty-five years of married life Nathalie has turned herself into a living fossil and seems scarcely concerned with the world around her.  This isn't life.  It is a somnambule existence.

Then her husband and her mother depart, and with them all of Nathalie's certainties.  All that she has left is an apartment-cum-library denuded of half of its books (the starkest symbol of a broken marriage) and an overweight black cat, aptly named Pandora.  For a while, Nathalie is paralysed with uncertainty.  She is like a bird in a cage, the door of which has just been opened.  As soon as she steps out of the mausoleum of her past life she wakes up to the opportunities that lie ahead.  Her extraordinary sense of release is captured by the dramatic shift in location to the stunning mountain landscapes of the Vercors.  In this second part of the film, Nathalie evinces both the trepidation and exhilaration of a first-time bungee jumper as she throws herself into an impromptu excursion that she hopes will allow her to regain her bearings.  By hooking up with a former student of hers, Fabien, she rediscovers the woman she was before marriage and materialism killed her individualism and turned her into a zombie-bourgeois intellectual - an independently minded idealist concerned with the plight of others and the way the world is run.

One of the reasons why L'Avenir is such an appealing film is that it is essentially a variation of the Sleeping Beauty story - one where the heroine is brought back to life not by the arrival of a handsome prince but by the timely departure of a husband and mother who sealed her in a tomb of bourgeois convention.  With remarkable insight for someone so young (the director is still only in her mid-thirties), Hansen-Løve crafts her most intimate and incisive character study yet, an optimistic parable that succinctly expresses her philosophy for life - which is that, instead of clinging to the dead certainties of the past, we should always be reaching for the future and the myriad possibilities it offers.  Change in ourselves is something we should submit to, not resist.

Film Synopsis

Nathalie appears comfortable in her settled life as a mother of two and a teacher of philosophy at a Parisian high school.  Now in her late fifties, she finds it hard to relate to her students' political views, even though she shared them when she was their age.  A bourgeois intellectual, Nathalie has no interest in student politics and contents herself with her teaching and writing, whilst caring for her elderly mother Yvette, whose health is in decline.  Then, all of a sudden, her world falls apart.  Her husband of 25 years leaves her to pursue a relationship with another woman, her mother dies and she is left contemplating a lonely and uncertain future.  Rather than wallow in self-pity, she decides to make the most of her newfound freedom by spending a few days in the Vercors, where one of her most promising students Fabien lives in an anarchist commune.  With Fabien's help, Nathalie will discover a new direction in her life and realise how empty her former existence has been.  Her life is only just beginning...