THAT cat: Isabelle Huppert is Nathalie Chazeaux making sense of an inherited cat.

Reviewed By Nomali Minenhle Cele

WHEN YOU ARE introduced to her, Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert) is a happy enough woman. She’s driven at her teaching job and secure in her marriage, her grown children are happy and healthy. She’s respected in her profession as a philosopher. The quiet cogs of her life churn on and she is satisfied.

Quite early into the film, however, the foundations of her life begin to shake. The future of the once-lucrative textbook she wrote is uncertain (she has to pay for that beautiful Paris flat somehow, surely). The world is changing. Her marriage is not as secure as she believes.

Nathalie’s relationship with her mother is troubled. Both women are at the stage of life where questions such as “when are you giving me grandchildren?” are replaced by 3am phone calls because mother is having an anxiety attack. Before she is committed to an old age home, the older woman lives in a flat, which she never leaves, surrounded by photographs of herself in her youth. She was a beauty, however, what time has taken is nothing compared to what a divergent brain takes. Or what death takes.

With a level head, Nathalie has to lament a marriage, and a seaside home. She also has to mourn the loss of her mother. And then there’s the question of making sense of the cat her mother leaves.

Huppert is a joy to watch. Her jokes, even in subtitles, are biting. Her observations on life, love and relationships are interesting, her Nathalie is warm. But she’s far from being every woman. Only women who look like that and have her level of education/social standing — but mostly, LOOK like that — get to have their singular story “Gets divorced, bordering-on-toxic mother dies, inherits cat, has a year of awakening and change” told. The fictional French white woman lives differently.

Nathalie’s relationship with her students, particularly Fabien (Roman Kolinka), is used as one of the primary lenses in this film, which also feeds off the developments in her private life. Fabien is proof that ideas can change. Nathalie knows this because one of the things she says to her husband when he says he’s leaving is: “I thought you would love me forever.” Forever, she discovers, is relative and she, even though she had always thought herself very happy and fulfilled in her marriage, confesses during a drive with Fabien that she welcomes the variety in music.

Broadly considered the darling of French film in 2016, this Things To Come is a rewarding and beautifully made film.

• Things To Come (2016) is directed by Mia Hansen-Love and stars Isabelle Huppert, André Marcon and Roman Kolinka. It is 102 minutes in length and is in French, German and English, with English subtitles. It is being screened as part of the European Film Festival in Johannesburg on May 5 and 14 at Cinema Nouveau in Rosebank, Pretoria on May 5 and 14 at Cinema Nouveau in Brooklyn, Cape Town on May 5 and 14 at Cinema Nouveau at the V&A and Durban on May 5 at Cinema Nouveau, Gateway. Visit eurofilmfest.co.za and www.cinemanouveau.co.za for more details.
• Nomali Minenhle Cele is a culture critic and writer from Soweto, and founder of the  zine Uju. Invoke her at her blog Nomali From Soweto.