Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘Things to Come’

I saw Mia Hansen-Løve’s L’Avenir in France during the summer and have now had the benefit of the subtitled UK release. Why the French title could not be translated literally as ‘The Future’, rather than reviving a celebrated usage by HG Wells in 1936, who knows?

Isabelle Huppert’s Nathalie Chazeaux is a Parisian philosophy teacher with grown-up children. After an ultimatum from their daughter, Nathalie’s husband Heinz (André Marcon), who also teaches philo, leaves her for his girlfriend, taking some of Nathalie’s books with him. Other traumas follow: Nathalie’s mother goes into a terminal decline; she has to take final leave of her husband’s family’s holiday home in Brittany; her publisher no longer thinks her books fit the market; going to the cinema solo she falls prey to a molester. Worse, philosophy being such an important part of Nathalie’s life, she finds herself at odds with Fabien (Roman Kolinka, right) a former pupil who seems to be turning towards anarchism. But after all this prospects of a happier future for Nathalie begin to emerge, not least as a grandmother. Huppert provides a totally convincing portrayal of a woman, and it could only be a woman, having to cope with so many intellectual and practical demands at the same time. Unsurprisingly unsentimental, Nathalie sends Heinz away rather than let him rejoin the family for poulet on Le Reveillon (chicken for Christmas Eve supper).

Philosophy is a prestigious subject in the French baccalauréat (approximately A-level in the UK or high school diploma level in the US) though Nathalie seems to be teaching at the even more demanding ‘prepa’ level which candidates for the grandes écoles have to achieve. For Arts students taking the bac literary stream, philosophy has the highest weighting (coeff) of all subjects.  In France exams are marked out of 20, 16 (80%) is a very high mark. There is a “little primer” on the philosophical references in L’Avenir on the ScreenPrism website. Some reviewers have referred to the Cazeaux as “academics”, but, although their pupils will call them profs, they are not university teachers.

Mia Hansen-Løve’s The Father of My Children impressed me in 2009 with its maturity of insight and elegant filming. L’Avenir is of just as high a standard, shot in Brittany and the Vosges as well as Paris. The director/writer draws heavily on her own experiences and discussed the similarities between Nathalie and her own mother with Xan Brooks in the Guardian. Hansen-Løve made an interesting choice of music, perhaps the most significant piece is the Schubert lied, Auf dem Wasser zu singen (To sing on the water), D774, sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau:
…
Like yesterday and today may time again escape from me,
Until I on towering, radiant wings
Myself escape from changing time

 

Olivier Assayas’ ‘Something In The Air’

When it came out in France last year, this film was titled Après Mai, May being that of 1968 when France descended into near-anarchy. It was a cathartic moment, subsequently referred to in France as les événements. Various directors have made films set during the period, (eg Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, (Innocents, 2003), but the subject inevitably has limited appeal outside France. Nonetheless there are probably quite a few people who were around at the time and agree with the late Christopher Hitchens:

As someone born in 1949, I prefer to consider myself not a mere sixties person but a soixante-huitard.

Assayas was born in 1955 and was probably kept indoors during the real thing. But since the tensions of 1968 continued for some years afterwards, his film, being to some extent autobiographical, concerns a group of lycée (ie high school/sixth form) students in the summer of 1971, three Mays later. It seems to be a convention in French cinema that the only subject seen to be taught in a lycée is French literature (cf Ozon’s In the House, earlier this year). To advance the cause of the proletariat these 17-year old children of the bourgeoisie engage in Maoist (or maybe Trotskyite, the sort of issue they would debate at length) acts of political violence, coming up against reality in the form of the CRS. For relief they dabble with the drugs of the period. You can take your pick as to whether the UK/US title, Something in the Air, is actually referring to tear gas or pot smoke, the revolution not so much being here as over. When it all gets too much they take themselves off to Italy for R&R and a bit of underground film-making.   Once back in Paris the Assayas-like character, Gilles, decides to abandon his talent for Eminesque drawing to follow in his father’s footsteps in the film business, just like Assayas did. So as the film ends he is starting work at Pinewood (chosen to boost the UK market perhaps, and looking like it did in My Week with Marilyn) on the set of a rubbishy Nazis and dinosaurs flick – well what would you expect from les Anglo-saxons? And where does Gilles finds solace but in a season of French experimental shorts at the Electric Cinema in Notting Hill.

To give credit where it’s due, the 1970s seem to be authentically set and the riot scenes are convincing enough. In that pre-digital age agitprop was a print-based activity, so the girls got to operate the machines when they weren’t keeping house for the collective or partying in long white dresses, as though auditioning for Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.  As may be apparent by now, I was a little disappointed in this film, particularly because I liked Assayas' Summer Hours (L'heure d'été, 2008). I suspect Après Mai might have benefited from editing down from its 122 minutes to 100 or so. Assayas is married to the talented young director Mia Hansen-Løve, whose film The Father of My Children (Le père de mes enfants, 2009), I mentioned at the end of a post here two years ago.

Guillaume Canet’s ‘Little White Lies’

Posts on this blog often lack the “south western” content that the Profile on the left might encourage readers to expect. So, the last film mentioned, Archipelago, being set in the Scilly Isles in SW England, it is appropriate that this post is about a film mostly shot in SW France, on the Atlantic coast of the Gironde.

Most cinema-goers in France see the same Hollywood product as the rest of the world, but the French government (nationally and regionally) goes out of its way to support a francophone film industry. For example, support to domestic films is a condition of the Canal+ TV licence. Admittedly much of what is produced is quite lightweight but at least it’s French, and it doesn’t get beyond the francophone world, where mainstream audiences don’t much go for subtitled foreign language films anyway. However, the best French films have for a long time attracted enthusiasts, cinéastes even, and are subject to serious critical attention eg recently, The Faber Book of French Cinema.

From time to time, French films do make it into the international mainstream. Recently, for example La Vie en Rose (an Edith Piaf biopic, La môme, in France) which became the third-highest-grossing French-language film in the United States in the last two decades. Piaf was played by Marion Cotillard, the partner of Guillaume Canet. Canet directed Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne, 2006), a well-regarded thriller, which he followed with Little White Lies (Les petits mouchoirs), just released in the UK.

Cotillard and others make up a strong cast for this tragi-comic story of Parisians on holiday at Cap Ferret, one of those French pine and sand seaside places with baffling 10-months-idle-out-of-12 economics. The plot (and some of the music) has more than a passing resemblance to Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (1973). Little White Lies is a bit too long and the cast a bit too slick at piling on the sentiment, however familiarity with some of the locations made up for a lot. If any reader who doesn’t know the area is looking for somewhere new to go in France this summer, Archachon, its Bassin, and the Pyla Dune certainly ‘merite un detour’, as does Cap Ferret and the view from the lighthouse there. In the magic two months of July and August, expect it to be busy.

Peter Aspden recently gave his Culture column in the FT over to a very droll tongue-in-cheek discussion of boboisme, in the context of Little White Lies:

You all know how it is with a certain type of French film. The women are beautiful, and so are the men. They smoke, but they do not have rasping coughs. They gather for al fresco suppers at their beach houses, and open bottles of cru classé wines that are drinking perfectly right now. They are good friends, with wholesome appetites and slim silhouettes.
… they talk of life. They wave their arms charismatically and make references to the philosophers they studied in their perfect schools. Their conversation is witty and fluent, and touches intellectual and emotional depths. Before the end of the evening, two of them will have paired off, seduced by the erotically charged debate. There are more cigarettes, more wine, more philosophy. None of them needs an early night because they don’t appear to have jobs, though they seem strangely well off. By the end of the film, they have wrestled with the dilemmas of human existence, but their affluent lives go on. There is always next Saturday night.
The French are not without a sense of self-deprecation, so they have a word for these admirable creatures: they are the bobo set, the “bourgeois bohemians” who fill the air with exotic ramblings and yet enjoy all the material comforts of a gilded life. It is a pejorative, ironic term. Yet the bobos are the envy of the world. They have worked out how to be rich and interesting, replete and reckless.

Little White Lies is certainly bobo but less intello than this description implies - no philo, for sure.

The French film which has impressed me recently was Mia Hansen-Løve’s Father of My Children (Le père de mes enfants, 2009), a very accomplished start to an almost certainly brilliant directing career. Here she is talking about that film.