Things to Come is no longer to come

I started watching Mia Hansen-Love's Things to Come in May of 2018. Kanopy still remembers how much of it I had watched, which was about ten minutes. (Come to think of it, this would have been a great choice in my bi-monthly Finish What You Started series from a few years ago, especially since there was one point where I was scrounging for a sixth title.)

The reason I stopped watching was that the image was going out of focus, and I could not read the subtitles. French is the language I know best other than English, but not well enough to follow a movie without the assistance of translation.

It's an interesting commentary on the change in our times in just those almost-four years. 

For one, I don't feel like the technology would still feature bugs like a streaming title going in and out of focus. This could have been my internet, since this may have been before we got the NBN (Nationwide Broadband Network), but I think even at the time I determined that the fault lay with Kanopy. I think I believed that internet issues would have caused lagging, as it did on other streaming prior to the NBN, but not the image itself going out of focus.

Secondly, I valued the currency of a Kanopy viewing credit a lot more back then. You get five per month, and I must have been watching enough on Kanopy to worry I was going to run through them that May. I actually emailed Kanopy to ask for my credit back given the focus issues.

This was an amazing response given that this is just one random title in a whole library of -- don't forget this part -- free titles.

"Thank you for your message. Our team is working to make a version of Things to Come available that does not have the subtitles burned into the video file so that they will still be visible if the image is out of focus. We will let you know once this is available. In the meantime, a play credit has been refunded to your account."

At the time, I thought this was great customer service. Now, I wonder why I even thought I was entitled to great customer service from a totally free resource, where the word "customer" does not have any real meaning. "Beggar not chooser" might have been more accurate.

I wasn't sure I was going to get through it on Monday night when I started watching it again.

I'm not sure if the memory of where I'd left off was the issue, but I of course started the movie over from the beginning, and only got about two minutes in before a timeout error occurred. The timeout error was so bad that I actually had to exit the entire app, something that was only possible by pressing random buttons on my AppleTV remote. (The button I usually use for such things was not working.) This happened twice more, and I was on the verge of giving up. But I decided to try one more time, and this time it passed the problematic point and I watched the rest of the film.

When I'd tried to start watching Things to Come in 2018, it was because I'd heard about this promising young director named Mia Hansen-Love and wanted to see what she was all about. I'd heard this title mentioned specifically. Since then, Hansen-Love seems to have made a name for herself on the international movie scene, her 2021 film Bergman Island (her first English language film) having won raves from critics. (This critic did not see it.)

I wasn't blown away by Things to Come. I don't know if I was expecting something more thematically bold or outside-the-box, but this is basically a standard French domestic drama starring the ageless Isabelle Huppert. Before you recoil at the word "standard" there, I should clarify that I consider a "standard" French domestic drama to implicitly have a high basic level of competence and watchability. The French do cinema pretty well. But I guess I thought that since Hansen-Love was positioned to me as this sort of breakout star to watch, I should expect something more distinctly cinematic, possessing some sort of original technique. What I got was an intermittently affecting consideration of a woman reaching a point in her life where the things she has counted on start to fall away, with the always effective Huppert delivering her usual strong work.

Now that I am reminded of Kanopy, what it has to offer and what good customer service it once gave me, maybe I'll start picking my way through my watchlist and go through those credits at a pace faster than one every six months. 

Assuming that my use of their service is in some way a measurable benefit to them, they deserve it.