Dreadfully Boring

Crappy film

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert) is a philosophy professor although a student strike is challenging the faculty. She is married but her husband reveals his cheating. Worst yet, he has to tell her as he moves out of the house. Her kids are moving on. Her disturbed mother keeps pulling her into her life. Her former student reconnects with her. As each part of her life is severed, she finds life in her new freedom.This is very french especially how Nathalie reacts to her husband's revelation. It doesn't have to be melodramatic but I would like for more drama. The danger is never that high although there is surely some emotional dangers. Huppert's classy acting keeps the movie compelling. I would like to have her disconnecting happen in the first half hour. Instead, it's dragged over an hour and there isn't enough time for her to find herself. It's the shortest of freedom rides. It's understated. I prefer something more dramatic.

It has been a long time since I last saw a more pretentious, artificial, unnatural film as this one. The acting is artificial, the plot is non- existent, the theme unnatural. The same unnatural French issues, never saying anything, cryptic and lacking any kind of depth. Absolutely awful and boring, boring in the deepest sense - why would anyone make a film about nothing to say nothing, to transmit nothing, to show nothing?!

Until this movie I never quite got the hype for Mia Hansen-Løve. Her slice-of-life, semi- autobiographical movies seemed forgettable to me. Maybe Hansen-Løve is growing as an artist, or maybe it's just Huppert. Whatever it is, Things to Come, is a movie that's stuck in my mind, a beautiful portrait of a woman whose life is upended just as she is entering the final third of her life. The great French actress Isabelle Huppert plays Nathalie (based on Hansen-Løve's own mother). A successful philosophy professor with two grown children, a fellow philosopher for a husband, and an ailing mother, she is comfortably settled in her life. But as the movie continues on we watch as the things that Nathalie considered so much a part of her, change, dissolve, disintegrate. I'll admit it, I was actually initially reluctant to watch the movie because the idea of seeing a woman having everything taken away from her seemed almost too sad to bear. And yet Things to Come is a surprisingly joyful movie. Nathalie isn't an automaton, she cries as the things she once counted on as part of her life are no more, but at the same time she picks herself up, dusts herself off and goes on.

Isabelle Huppert plays Nathalie a woman reaching middle age with a long time marriage and two grown up children. She teaches philosophy at a high school in Paris and life is good. She also enjoys her former students who seem to nurture her in return for the nurturing she gave them.Then her husband announces he is having an affair and is leaving her. With the certitude of familiarity now removed and new possibilities blossoming she has to decide if this is a tragedy or a new beginning and what to make of her life.Now this is just compelling from start to finish all the performances are brilliant. This is one of those films where you feel you are being a voyeur in many respects – it is that well done. The sub stories too are done with such care that they segue seamlessly into the main narrative – rather like the way things do in real life. Huppert is superb (as she always is) Roman Kolinka as Fabien is rather good to and worthy of a mention as he is sort of ambiguous but in a way so contrived that you question whether he actually is. Anyway, in French a bit of German and the ever present English this is an understated gem that will bring much reward to any who should seek it out – recommended.