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Berlinale Review: Director Mia Hansen-Love wins Silver Bear for ‘L’Avenir’ – Our Rave

February 21, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The Director Mia Hansen-Love wins a Silver Bear for her fifth film

The Director Mia Hansen-Love wins a Silver Bear for her fifth film


When men hit midlife, they buy a red convertible, maybe a toupee and a gym membership – and often trade in the used wife for a new cookie. In contrast, the wives they cast off cry on public transportation. They contemplate and reject plastic surgery. When the public weeping stops, they may rejoice that that’s a legion of dirty socks they won’t have to bend over and pick up from the floor in the future. Ultimately, there’s a sense of liberation.

In L’avenir (Things to Come), Mia Hansen-Love’s realistic French-language drama making its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, the Eden director follows the rhythms of Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert), a married Parisian high school philosophy professor and mother of two grown children. She should be enjoying the fruits of her labor, but then discovers that even when you have your own act very much together your life can still fall apart.

Huppert as Nathalie is about as much of a perfect woman—a feminist role model—as can be seen on screen. She is slim, and in that Parisian way, effortlessly chic. She passionately teaches philosophy—she’s big on Rousseau and the social contract—cooks game hen, arranges flowers, reads voraciously, tersely tends to her increasingly demented and childish mother, and enjoys the company of two children raised with love. As played by Huppert with confidence, control and minimal fuss, Nathalie is capable and brisk, enjoying life within the lines she has drawn over the past two plus decades.

And then Nathalie’s husband Heinz (Andre Marcon) announces he wants to leave, Nathalie’s publisher wants to sex up the covers of the philosophy texts she’s been writing for years, and her children become increasingly self-sufficient. It seems that the social contract she made with the world – that she would work hard and with integrity and be rewarded – has been broken. The movie echoes the 1978 Paul Mazursky film An Unmarried Woman with Jill Clayburgh, although infinitely more dry-eyed. Nathalie faces her future philosophically, navigating the unexpected upset as she would the countless crises of child-rearing or marriage – overcome the trauma, patch the problem and keep moving forward until it hurts just a little less, and then a little less. One day, the sun comes out and you can again feel its warmth on your cheeks, and get traction under your relatively sensible shoes (she is Parisian after all).

[Related: Meryl Streep Praises Hollywood’s ‘New Time of Possibility for Women’]

Writer-director Hansen-Love creates a lovely, mostly sharp character portrait of a capable woman facing a crisis in midlife with integrity. If Nathalie lacks the messiness and warmth of Clayburgh’s suddenly unmarried woman, that’s alright. Not everyone wears their life on their sleeve and the restraint here of Nathalie, and Hansen-Love, is admirable. The drama meanders in the third act, as Nathalie visits a protégé living on an anarchist farm and gets her puff of weed. But what makes it work is that, unlike Heinz, she doesn’t escape her rising sense of mortality by getting lost in the rumpled sheets with a man half her age. Sure, she looks over that cliff, and flirts with a neo-hippie commune – even hugging a donkey at one point – but the movie’s virtue is that, in the end, Nathalie returns to a life that she controls, crisply and philosophically. And, like Huppert herself, never makes one false move.

This review originally appeared on VanityFair.com

Filed Under: Criticism, Movies & TV Tagged With: Actresses over 40, Berlinale, cheating husbands, female-driven, infidelity, Isabelle Huppert, Mia Hansen-Love, Silver Bear, Vanity Fair

Critics Pick: ‘Stories We Tell’

July 10, 2013 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Must-See Movies Beyond the Blockbusters

Watching “Stories We Tell” feels like sharing a comfy couch beside a close friend — who happens to be an amazing storyteller with a show-stopping secret. In her third film as a writer-director (“Away From Her,” “Take This Waltz”), the Canadian actress Sarah Polley, 34, uses nonfiction to unknot her shocking family history. Because her parents, Michael and Diane Polley, were theater people, the revelations also played out on a public stage. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Criticism, Movies & TV Tagged With: Best Documentary, Documentary, infidelity, Oscars 2014, Sarah Polley

Adams On Reel Women: Rachel Weisz on wives gone wild, ‘The Deep Blue Sea,’ and ‘Anna Karenina’

January 6, 2013 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Golden Globe Nominee Rachel WeiszThere’s a purity to the English actress Rachel Weisz, as she glides from playing a doctor in the popcorn thriller “The Bourne Legacy” to a love-besotted wife in the intellectual romance “The Deep Blue Sea.” In the latter film, she plays Hester Collyer, a postwar English aristocrat who risks everything for an affair with the charming but vapid pilot Freddie Page (“Thor’s” Tom Hiddleston). Weisz delivers an Oscar-worthy performance that merits a second look. Adapted from the Terence Rattigan play and directed by Terence Davies, “The Deep Blue Sea” is one of the best films of 2012 that you probably haven’t seen: It grossed $1.1 million domestically, while “The Bourne Legacy” hauled in $275 million worldwide.

One difference between the two movies: In the big-budget “Bourne” Weisz is the chief damsel in distress; in “TDBS” she’s the lead, and her character’s story drives the plot. The posh Hester has married an older man for love and social position and then gets blown sideways when she meets a man in uniform who unleashes her libido. There’s a thematic parallel to “Anna Karenina,” another historical fiction about a women who exits a stifling marriage through infidelity and suffers the consequences.

Weisz, who married Daniel Craig last year, was sitting over breakfast in a boho East Village cafe with me as she reflected on Hester’s parallels with Keira Knightley’s Karenina. In both movies, the husband isn’t demonized to justify the wife’s action. In “TDBS,” Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale) clearly wants the best for Hester despite her infidelity. “Yes,” agreed Weisz, “he’s a nice guy. He’s a sweetheart. When I read it, I’d imagined a really evil, horrible, nasty husband.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Celebrity, Essay, Movies & TV, Oscar Race Tagged With: Adams on Reel Women, Awards, Golden Globes, infidelity, Interview, NYFCC, Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea, Yahoo! Movies

Playdate Excerpt: Collateral Damage

March 31, 2011 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Playdate, Encinitas, Novel, SAHD, SAHM, Yoga,Tantric Sex

Star-crossed lovers

The scene: the morning of Belle’s eleventh birthday as the Witch Creek Fire crests. Lance is her father. Their neighbor Wren is Lance’s tantric sex partner and the mother of Sam and Max.

An hour later, Lance and Belle worked off their pancakes in Encinitas Park, kicking the soccer ball, trying to maintain the rhythm for as long as they could, back and forth, to the side, to the side, going long. The air quality was crap, and their throats were raw. There was a swath of blue above the ocean, but overhead, smudge- gray smoke clouds filled the sky like dirty insulation. Belle wore her retired Barstow soccer uniform: nylon goldenrod shorts and T-shirt gray from washing. go rattlers! Intent on maintaining the rally, the pair didn’t notice a silver Volvo SUV scraping the curb and disgorging Sam. The wethaired boy flew fl at- out toward them. He entered the game with a smooth steal, amping up the energy level. Lance fell back like a player tagged by his replacement and strolled toward the car. “Need help?” he called, watching Wren struggle with the car seat as she tried to unbuckle the sleeping Max.

“Damn,” Wren whispered. With her back to Lance, she felt for the release lever that was beneath the car seat and between Max’s legs. She crouched awkwardly while she tried to release the unseen mechanism without jarring the toddler, then shecarefully raised the shoulder straps over Max’s sleeping head. She lifted the sleeping baby giant, cradling his head and finding the right spot for it on her shoulder as she backed out of the SUV.

Wren rose and turned, with Max heavy but reassuring against her chest, his eyelashes tickling her neck. She protected him—and he protected her; for Max, she could be stronger than she ever was alone.

“Need help?” Lance whispered.

No, she mouthed. In faded red yoga pants and a turquoise hoodie, her head angled to compensate for Max’s weight, her smile content and mysterious, she was a beach bum Madonna. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, Playdate Tagged With: Divorce, Encinitas, Excerpt, infidelity, Marriage, Novel, Playdate, SAHD, SAHM, Southern California, Star-crossed lovers, Tantric Sex, Witch Creek Fire, Yoga

Author-to-Author: Paula Bomer

March 21, 2011 By Thelma 1 Comment

Paula Bomer,Interview,Author-to-Author,Thelma Adams,Women's Literary Fiction,Parenting,Brooklyn,Babies,Motherhood,Infidelity

Bomer's debut story collection

Welcome to the first in a series of interviews with women writers. Here, we dance chick-to-chick with gutsy Brooklyn writer, mother, wife and homeowner Paula Bomer, 42. The acclaimed author doesn’t swaddle the truth when discussing her debut fiction collection Baby & Other Stories, praised as “raw and angry” by Publisher’s Weekly.

BEGINNINGS:

Thelma Adams: How old were you when you came out of the closet as a writer?

Paula Bomer: I started writing fiction in high school. After I graduated from college with a degree in psychology, I began writing fiction more regularly, knowing it was what I wanted to do. By 22, I began taking workshops. I applied to graduate writing programs at 24.

TA: What did you like to read as a kid?

PB: I read everything. As a young girl I read all the Beverly Clearly and Judy Blume books. I loved Madeline Lengle.

TA: And what did you read as a young adult?

PB: By the age of twelve, I had run out of children’s books and began reading things that went above my head. I read everything by Toni Morrison.  And with great delight and horror, I read Wifey by Judy Blume. How shocking that the Blume of my grade school years could write so explicitly about sex! It was a very exciting time, moving toward books for grown ups, even if I didn’t understand everything.

TA: What was the first dirty passage you read in a book?

PB: Well, that might have been Wifey. I loved Chaucer in high school. In college, I went through a stage of reading Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski: all sorts of dirty stuff but it was “literature,” too. Later, Philip Roth, Mary Gaitskill and Alicia Erian, to name a few, also showed me how writing explicitly about sexual matters doesn’t belittle the work.

TA: What did you wish when you were first starting out as a writer?

PB: I wished to be published and read and, quite frankly, to cause a certain amount of trouble, the trouble that Henry Miller caused, the trouble that Philip Roth caused with Portnoy’s Complaint. I’m over that, for the most part. I’m not ashamed of wanting to cause trouble – you can’t tell me Roth didn’t have the same childish desire – but it’s fine to be over it, too. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, Playdate Tagged With: Author-to-Author, Babies, Brooklyn, infidelity, Interview, Parenting, Paula Bomer, Playdate, Publisher's Weekly, short fiction, Women's Contmporary Fiction

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