Things To Come *

     Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) is a middle age philosophy teacher whose husband (also a philosophy teacher)  leaves her for a younger woman.  She doesn’t fall apart. She boots him out and just gets on with life.  Her primary concern are their two children (who are actually  grown up and independent now) and her ageing mother.  Oh, and her mother's cat, Pandora, who she has to keep transporting by putting him in a basket (think box) ...and then taking him out again and then putting him back in again (yeah we get it).
Nathalie has also got this thing going with her publisher who wants to re-edit her books to make them more accessible (I wish the same editors were working on this film).  

So boring not even the actors or cat
can stay awake.

With Mum and the Ex gone and the summer holidays looming Nathalie is invited away by a former student and his new friends so she can listen to their ridiculous philosophical arguments as they put together some silly book about the next overdue revolution.
On the other side of her life she stays angry with the Ex, see's her Mum off, and gets gooey about becoming a Grandma.  At times it’s like Soap Opera.
  Some of the best films I have recently seen have come from France, but this sure as hell ain't one of them!

After the brilliant Elle, it’s a shame to see Isabelle Huppert doing this rubbish.  Talking of which,unless I’m seriously mistaken there is a scene in this film where the spirit of Elle is curiously channeled as we watch Nathalie be sexually assaulted whilst responding with the indifference of waving away a fly.  All made sense in Elle, but in this this film it just looked  like a  pointless, incongruous, copycat insert. What the heck was that about?!   

        And it preaches too: which is bad enough with the philosophical quotes but it even tries to introduce us to Woody Guthrie, because we wouldn’t have heard of him right?  But like the sexual assault scene, like the Rousseau quotes, it tells us more about the directors naivety and precociousness than anything else.

      It's directed by Mia Hansen-Love who gave us The Father Of My Children in 2010, which I personally classified as just about the most irritating and pretentious film I saw that year.  I’m ready to nominate this film for the same award in 2017.