"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.
Review of Things to Come
