After a streak of films (Eden and Goodbye First Love) largely concerned with the notion of faded youth and lost loves, Things to Come sees French director Mia Hansen-Løve take a noticeable shift. Her protagonist is Nathalie (Huppert), a middle-aged philosophy teacher, who isn’t yearning for some better times in the past, but rather practically and calmly trying to assess where her life goes in the future, after the sudden departure of her husband of 25 years (Marcon), after he confesses to having an affair.
Elsewhere, Nathalie’s overbearing mother (Scob) seems to be approaching death’s door, while Nathalie’s perspectives on the world are consistently being questioned and reshaped by the unfettered ways of both her adult offspring and, in particular, a former pupil, Fabien (Kolinka, who had a major part in Eden), whom she’s reconnected with. Additionally causing a further upheaval to the status quo of her life is a loss of income from publisher shake-ups seeing her respected textbook being deemed out of vogue. Essentially, what we have here is evidence that no matter how well-adjusted you may think you are, the proverbial excrement is always bound to hit the fan at some point. And sometimes, you’ve just got to make something out of the lemons life gives you, even if it’s not lemonade…
Read Write Hand 