Proxima (2019)

The opening film of this year’s Glasgow Film Festival is Proxima, directed by Alice Winocour. Its opening movement, in which astronaut Sarah (Eva Green) and her daughter Stella (Zélie Boulant) run through a mock lift-off sequence, stands in for a miniature of the film itself: Winocour probes into the knotted emotions of both mother and daughter, following Sarah as she attends training for an upcoming mission to Mars, and Stella as she isolates herself. Proxima has, by its design, given itself the unenviable task of genre course-correction: it engages with questions usually rushed through in space movies so directors can show off their CGI budgets, focusing on the run-up to the lift-off rather than the mission itself.

Winocour has a habit of integrating different formats or visual distortions into the texture, physical and emotional, of her films. In Disorder, her taut and engaging thriller starring Matthias Schoenaerts as a PTSD-suffering private security heavy, this is achieved through frequently adopting the perspective of one of the many surveillance cameras lodged around the interior of his employer’s mansion. In Proxima, the changes are less intuitively handled, but more moving: through phone cameras, a telescope’s long lens, Face-time screens, a peephole, low-grade recorders and other means, Winocour allows Sarah the chance to see the world differently just as she’s about to leave it, and allows Stella to see what it might look like in her mother’s absence.

Eva Green is tremendous, carrying the film as her character bears the double strain of her daughter’s present and future absence and the physical toil that training involves. Perhaps Winocour is a little too dependent on Green’s wry smile, which at times signals an invective lying beneath it, but when it’s deployed right it’s a joy.

Ryuichi Sakamoto contributes a lovely, upward-rising choral-electronic score, and it’s at work in a peaceful scene involving the training astronauts on a drill, camping in the woods. Anton (Aleskey Fateev) recites Osip Mandelstam’s “The Necklace” (‘you can’t untie a boat unmoored’) and Mike plumps for Walt Whitman’s “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun” (‘Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed’). Curiously, Sarah offers no poem, and instead stares up contentedly at the stars’ arrangement, as if hers is up there.

But Winocour does take shortcuts at times, and the scenes in question are ill-thought-out. For instance, for a film essentially about the complicated mess of feelings associated with mother-daughter separation, a late-in-the-day excursion does prompt head-scratching: doubly disappointing because the subject is vast and potentially affecting — leaving for Mars, getting as far away from her child as humanly possible, is an enormous abandonment. Yet Stella knows it’s an honour for mother, and knows she should go through with it, but the film irons out some of the inevitable ambivalence, therefore flattening the feeling. Similarly, the sexism of her colleague Mike (Matt Dillon) is singled out and made exceptional, which lets the institutions responsible for facilitating space-travel (and, it follows, for the disparity between the number of women and men performing the role) off the hook.