Things to come/L’Avenir review: a rich, beautiful, oblique drama

Does “vibrant fatalism” make any kind of sense? Are we wandering into oxymoron? Well, vibrant fatalism does seem to be what we get from this rich, beautiful, oblique drama by the ever more impressive Mia Hansen-Løve.

Following the excellent Eden, the French film-maker – drawing influence from her own parents – tells us about a middle-aged philosophy professor facing up to life alone. The film has all the surface glamour you'd expect from a superior French art film. Denis Lenoir's camera casts robust romance about Normandy and a less forbidding light across high-brow Paris. When folk dine outside, they carry those small ceramic pots – is it jam? – that one always sees in Eric Rohmer pictures.

Enough facetiousness. Things to Come gains its weight and its resonance from a supreme lead performance by Isabelle Huppert. Hansen-Løve gives us a character who does not much enjoy complaining about her lot. After all, poorer people suffer the same vicissitudes in much less happy circumstances. This is somebody who recognises the wretchedness of the human condition, but who appears quietly committed to enjoying the remaining pleasures. Nobody is better than Huppert at directing disdainful humour towards deserving targets. For all the great moments she has in this film, none beats the snorting laugh she emits when spotting her recently estranged husband hurrying after his much younger girlfriend. "How typical," it seems to say. "How vulgar. How unoriginal."

Her husband’s desertion is just one of several disappointments visited on Nathalie Chazeaux in the opening half of the film. One of her favourite students is moving on to a life with rural anarchists. Her difficult mother, played by the legendary Edith Scob, is showing the early signs of dementia.

The picture allows Nathalie to process these traumas with a philosopher’s brain. A lovely open ending suggests that, though she can’t go on, she will go on, nonetheless. And in relative good humour.

What a tonic this film is.