Sight&Sound - 05.2020

(Jacob Rumans) #1
REVIEWS

May 2020 | Sight&Sound | 79

Reviewed by Katherine McLaughlin
With a few exceptions, cinema has reserved
the central role of the astronaut for men. In
recent years Sandra Bullock played a grieving
mother in Gravity (2013) and Anne Hathaway
donned the spacesuit for Interstellar (2014);
but Alice Winocour’s ambitious take is
emphatically more down to earth and more
relatable, as she explores what it is like for a
working mother in a male dominated field.
In this rigorously researched spin on the space
movie, Winocour has achieved an astonishing
feat for all womankind. It’s a fantastic voyage,
shot on location at Star City near Moscow and
the European Astronaut Centre at Cologne,
which repurposes classic lost-in-space tropes
and acts as love letter to working mums who
are attempting to balance motherhood with
career. Winocour – director of Augustine (2012)
and Disorder (2015) – explores the theme of
separation through the mother-daughter
relationship, asking female-specific questions
that have never been posed in this type of film
before. It has a lot in common with Damien
Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic First Man
(2018), especially in its attentiveness to the
detail of the practical pre-launch elements
of space travel, but it boldly sets itself apart
with its refreshing female perspective.


Reviewed by Violet Lucca
“Write what you know” is a familiar adage;
a more valuable bit of advice is to get some
distance from personal pain before turning it
into art. The time between pain and art allows
poignant work like Sally Potter’s The Roads Not
Taken, which takes movie clichés – the death
of a child, caring for a parent with dementia


  • and infuses them with heartfelt emotion.
    The problems of autobiography, the writing
    process and the writer’s ego recur throughout
    the film, establishing bitter ironies. Leo (Javier
    Bardem) was a novelist, before an unnamed
    disorder restricted his ability to communicate and
    control his body. While he is mentally revising
    other parts of his life, Molly, his daughter, is trying
    to get him to two appointments. They work at
    cross-purposes: Leo is often so engrossed in his
    ‘work’ that he performs a gesture that makes
    sense in that memory but not during, say, a dental
    exam. This disjunction can be humorous, but also
    terrifying: Leo exits a moving taxi, prompting
    an MRI and a visit from his ex-wife Rita (Laura
    Linney), also a writer – she says they broke up
    because she became more successful than him.
    Potter intersperses Molly’s caregiving with
    the memories Leo reimagines through the day.
    Like Orlando, in Potter’s 1992 film, Leo has a core
    which remains the same despite his diverging
    journeys. Early on, that consistency makes it hard
    to distinguish contemporaneous events from
    memory fragments. For instance, Leo’s introduced
    lying in bed with his eyes open; the next moment,
    he’s still lying there but now arguing with a
    woman, who turns out to be Dolores, his first
    wife (Salma Hayek). Their argument is opaque
    for most of the film – she keeps urging him to
    come with her, not specifying where; he responds,
    “My love, it’s a public celebration of pain that’s
    become a fucking circus.” Much later it’s revealed
    that Leo was a avoiding a visit to the grave of
    their son, who was struck and killed by a car on
    his way to school. But earlier, when he is lying
    in hospital after his accident, Leo mumbles
    something about Dolores and their son, which
    Rita uses as an opportunity to tell their daughter
    Molly that his first marriage was “a co-dependent
    disaster, as far as I could tell,” and that Leo was
    “obsessed with having boys”. How ironic that
    he is being cared for by his only daughter!
    Leo is misunderstood by the world around
    him. The healthcare workers ask Molly “Is
    he all there?”, should he be tranquillised? –
    the casual cruelty will be familiar to anyone
    who is elderly or disabled, or who has been
    a caregiver. Molly fights back aggressively
    against these dehumanising remarks, but
    cannot stop them. Nor can she prevent the
    totally different, xenophobic micro- and
    macroaggressions Leo experiences because
    he’s Mexican. Shortly before he’s tackled by a
    security guard for carrying another woman’s
    dog – he mistook it for his beloved dead pet
    Nestor –the woman chases after him and
    screams, “Get out of my country!” (The film is
    set entirely in New York, the woman is British.)
    The horrible, sparse milieu of the big-box
    store where this happens communicates as
    much as the faint pink of his house
    in Mexico, the brown of the dentist’s


Sarah (Eva Green) is isolated by her gender,
humiliatingly underestimated by her male
co-workers. Green plays her as determined yet
fragile, occasionally welling up with sadness
and the thought of failure. Her scenes with
her daughter Stella (played by Zélie Boulant)
are powerful; Winocour’s use of close up on
Stella’s saucer-blue eyes as she looks at her
mother and then to the skies are deeply emotive,
laced with concern and awe. At one point
Stella is seen dressed up in white skirt and Ugg
boots, happily investigating recreated moon
terrain and providing a hopeful illustration of
what her mother’s ambition transmits to her
impressionable mind. Fatherhood is glimpsed
through an obnoxious American astronaut,
Mike (Matt Dillon), and his relationship
with his sons: it seems that the pressures on
mothers whose ambitions might clash with
childcare are not much felt by fathers.
Gorgeous, elegantly framed images evoke
the experience of being in the womb – one of
Sarah embracing Stella in a swimming pool
is particularly stirring. Working on multiple
levels, Proxima reveals the strength it takes
to become untethered from a child. The film
closes by paying tribute to women astronauts;
but its messages about motherhood and
sexism are relevant to any industry.

Proxima
Director: Alice Winocour
Certificate 12A 107m 23s


The Roads Not Taken
United Kingdom/Spain/Poland/Sweden/USA 2020
Director: Sally Potter

The European Space Astronaut centre, the near
future. A crew is set to head to the International Space
Station for one final mission before the voyage to
Mars becomes a reality. Sarah, a French scientist, is
offered the opportunity to spend one year at the ISS.
She puts her all into an intensive training programme,
only to face guilt over the separation from her young
daughter, Stella. Sarah’s astrophysicist ex-husband
Thomas takes on parental responsibilities, and Stella

relocates to his home in Germany. At Star City, the
cosmonaut training centre in Russia, Sarah bonds
with her male crew members, while testing the
limits of her physical and mental strength. Stella is
occasionally interviewed by an ESA employee, who
acts as guide and guardian when she travels to visit
her mother at the training centres. As the distance
between mother and daughter grows, Sarah’s
anxiety threatens to throw the mission off course.

Produced by
Isabelle Madelaine
Émilie Tisné
Written by
Alice Winocour
With the
collaboration of:
Jean-Stéphane Bron
Director of
Photography
George Lechaptois
Editor
Julien Lacheray

Production Designer
Florian Sanson
Music
Ryuichi Sakamoto
Sound Recordists
Pierre André
Valérie Deloof
Marc Doisne
Costume Designer
Pascaline Chavanne
Production
Companies

A Dharamsala, Darius
Films, Pathé, France
3 Cinéma, Pandora
Film co-production
with the participation
of Canal+, Ciné+,
France Télévisions
and Centre National
du Cinéma et de
l’Image Animée
With the support of
Région Île-de-France,
Région Provence-

Alpes-Côte d’Azur
and Film- und
Medienstiftung NRW
In association with
Indéfilms 7, Cinémage
13 and Cofinova 15

Cast
Eva Green
Sarah Loreau
Zélie Boulant
Stella Akerman

Loreau
Matt Dillon
Mike Shannon
Aleksey Fateev
Anton Ocheivsky
Lars Eidinger
Thomas Akerman
Sandra Hüller
Wendy Hauer
Trond-Erik Vassal
Jurgen
In Colour

[1.85:1]
Subtitles
Distributor
Picturehouse
Entertainment

Starwoman: Zélie Boulant, Eva Green


Credits and Synopsis
Free download pdf