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Part of the Malvern French Film Festival. There will be a short introduction to the film by Fiona Handyside, Associate Professor at the University of Exeter.Directed by Mia Hansen-Love, this is a terrific film, utterly real, that involves you emotionally and intellectually throughout. Isabelle Huppert is note perfect as a woman navigating mid-life crisis and finding freedom.
She plays a philosophy teacher spiralling through a series of late-life crises. We meet her en-route to the tidal island of Grand Bé off Brittany, earnestly discussing the visual quality of music with her husband, Heinz (André Marcon).
Jumping ahead several years Nathalie is in Paris, where protests are preventing her students from attending class, to the annoyance of the one-time communist; “just for three years, like most intellectuals”. When Heinz taunts her about her shifting politics, Nathalie scornfully replies that he hasn’t changed his since he was 18.
Yet Heinz has a secret that will prove that love is even less certain than politics or philosophy. “I thought you’d love me forever,” says Nathalie, ruefully. “What an idiot.
Hansen-Løve serves up unapologetic discussions of Rousseau, radicalism and revolution in a world in which the Unabomber’s manifesto sits side by side with the classics and clerics declare that “doubt and questioning are inextricably bound up with faith”. It sounds unbearably heavy, but there is such life in the character of Nathalie, partly inspired by the director’s mother, that this often turns to levity and laughter.
Crucially, if unfashionably in Cinéma these days, Nathalie’s profession is central to her existence. Beyond her marital problems Nathalie’s primary relationship is with her books, and one of the film’s most harrowing scenes shows her once tightly packed bookshelves riddled with gaping holes after a domestic cull leaves her beloved books lying on their sides.
At the same time Nathalie must answer the constant cries for help from her mother, with Edith Scob superbly querulous as the former model whose ambitions and anxieties have been bequeathed to her daughter, along with her overweight cat, Pandora.
As a daughter and a mother Nathalie fulfils a dual role that is threatened at the same moment that her husband proves inconstant. Yet rather than looking for a trite romantic “solution” to her isolation -there’s a frisson of attraction with her protege, Fabien, seductively played by Roman Kolinka – the film keeps Nathalie on the move. Her character is involved in a constant arc, an ongoing flow of life in which the future is waiting to be written.
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Event Venue
Malvern Theatres, Malvern Theatres, Grange Road,Malvern, Worcestershire, Worcester, United Kingdom
Tickets
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