* * * * 1/2
I can’t remember the last time I was as moved – nay, emotionally wrecked – by a film as I was by Alice Wincour’s Proxima (available on VOD in Australia from June 3rd, through Madman Entertainment). Clearly, we’re all a little tender right now, parents perhaps especially so, protective of our young, sitting ducks for the right thoughtful drama about parental responsibility to come along and rip open our hearts. I’m in the film’s demographic sweet spot, being a father of a young daughter, and I could’ve essentially wept through this beautiful film’s entire hundred and seven minutes.
Eva Green plays Sarah, a French astronaut, living and training at the European Space Agency in Cologne, and bringing up her eight year old daughter Stella. When she is selected for a one-year mission aboard the International Space Station, Sarah finds that, despite wanting to go to space since she herself was a little girl, she now feels deeply conflicted about leaving her child.
We follow Sarah through detailed and ultra-realistic scenes of an astronaut’s specific training. Sequences were shot at the European Space Agency in Cologne and at Star City near Moscow, on actual training equipment, in actual uniforms, according to actual protocols. Purely as a procedural about what modern astronauts do, Wincour’s film would have been fascinating. Much of the equipment looks decidedly un-futuristic, indeed evocative of imagery from the 60s and 70s; the astronauts accompanying Sarah on her mission, one Russian and one American, are worldly (the film’s characters freely talk in French, English, German and Russian) but the American, played by Matt Dillon, has some clear attitudes towards female astronauts that aren’t so.
But this is not a film about Sarah coming up against sexism, or about the sheer challenges she faces in her training, although both those elements are there. This is a film about parenthood, and the hugely emotional bond between a mother and her child when her child is still young and vulnerable (Stella is eight). Sarah’s excitement to fulfil her lifelong dream of venturing into space is immediately and overwhelmingly tempered by her grief and guilt for leaving her daughter, despite the girl’s father, an amiable astrophysicist who also works at the European Space Agency in Cologne, being a decent man who Stella loves and Sarah can trust. Sarah can train all day at the limits of human physical and mental ability, only to find her most challenging moment upon hearing, via Facetime, that her daughter’s not made any friends at her new school and is spending her lunchtimes in the playground alone. This news would be heartbreaking to any parent, and any parent can relate, astronaut or not. Wincour worked closely with Claudie Haignéré, the first female French astronaut, as she wrote the script, and her film hardly suggests that mothers feel the pain, and responsibility, of separation too much; rather, it demands of any parent, “How could you not?”
Eva Green’s naturalistic performance is superb, her eyes registering every minute repercussion her choices make on her child. As that child, a young French girl named Zélie Boulant, who was essentially discovered for the film, makes it. Her ability to register those indescribable emotional wounds that occur when a child is, say, denied an adult’s promise, and offer them in a brave yet ever-so-trembling voice, is astonishing and – here’s that word again – heartbreaking. The whole film is heartbreaking, never by trading in cheap dramatics (it’s the furthest thing from a manipulative “weepie”) but by simply recognising and dramatising fundamental truths: parenthood is impossible to perfect, we hurt our children even when we couldn’t love them more, there is nothing stronger than the bond of a parent and child, and that bond must inevitably sever.
Non-parents may not get it; parents may find Proxima their film of the year. Astronauts too.