A film review: Proxima (2019)
Despite being billed as Eva Green’s best screen role Proxima is an unsatisfying and didactic film that attempts to illustrate the conflict between career and family. A commonplace issue for many people, men and women; however, in this case, we’re not talking 9-5, five days a week. Eva plays an astronaut vying to spend a year on the international space station.
She’s Sarah Loreau, a French women in this very European of films. In it Sarah speaks four languages; French, German, Russian and English. Even her six to seven year old daughter, Stella, speaks three. And I don’t even do one particularly well!
Stella? Can’t be a coincidence – cheesy or witty?
Whichever, Stella is played beautifully by Zélie Boulant, in only her second screen role, her first back in the 2012 film Pieces of Me, where she played, according to IMDB, literally ‘the baby in the window’. In Proxima, certainly a more challenging role, she is bubbly, intense and cute, sometimes all at the same time, and her and Eva have formed a close and affectionate on-screen bond. For me it’s the single best feature; this mother and daughter relationship. Indeed, the raison d’être of the film.
Matt Dillon, who I’ve not seen in anything for years, plays a fellow astronaut, Mike Shannon, the inevitable Hollywood presence. He seems out of place at first, the film being based, mostly, at Space City, the common name for the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre near Moscow. Although it was actually filmed at the European Astronaut Centre near Cologne. It’s possible that the producers wanted a Hollywood name, although I’m sure that they could have found a more contemporary box office star, but they may also have wanted a full-on, gung-ho, in your face character that Americans seem to do better than Europeans. I don’t know, but an interesting thought. Three Europeans may be have been too ‘nice’!
However, for all that, he played a good role, and an interesting and maturing relationship develops between him and Sarah. It didn’t start well, Mike chiding Sarah as a ‘space tourist’, a comment that must have touched a nerve as she ups her training intensity to the point of breakdown, whilst at the same time trying to spend as much time as she can with Stella, now living with Sarah’s estranged husband, Thomas, played well and sympathetically by Lars Eidinger. Thomas is a man for whom a lot is asked. Not because he has to raise his daughter, that’s his job, but he also has to care for and prepare a child for being without her mother for a year.
Aleksey Fateev plays Anton, a cosmonaut in this unlikely team of three. Much more sensitive than Mike, he is the calming influence. All in all an interesting trio, set to live together for 12 months in the confines of the ISS.
As the film progresses, and the training intensifies, and the looming split with her daughter moves closer, Sarah’s doubts and fears grow, her daughter becoming more and more withdrawn, confused and distant.
All good so far. All building nicely towards the climax – will she go, won’t she go? Thoroughly enjoyable, thought provoking cinema performed to a high standard, and lining up to be a good’n.
But then, oh dear, what have they done?
Trying my very best not to give the game away the film, for me, was blown apart in a single scene of madness.
That’s all I’m going to say, but you will know it when you see it. We sat there, astounded, mumbling ‘no, no, surely not’. But she did. At that point I would have switched it off. However, it’s not easy, or fair, writing a review if you haven’t watched the entire film. So I endured.
Of course, films are subjective experiences. This particular scene may not bother you, you may think that it’s perfectly reasonable, in keeping with the character and the seriousness of the situation, in which case you will thoroughly enjoy Proxima. The film is certainly an emotional rollercoaster and, as I’ve said, an interesting film to debate afterwards. Should a mother (or father) leave a young child for a year. Is that selfish and cruel, or is it justified by a career choice? This is not the place for me to opine.
However, personally, that single scene deflates the mood faster that a punctured space station. I felt the rug had been pulled from under me. A great shame.
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