The main subject of the contemporary French cinema—albeit a subject that underlies the action and rarely comes to the fore—is infrastructure, and the infrastructure of modern French life is as much a matter of discourse as it is a matter of matter. Mia Hansen-Løve's "Things to Come," opening today, is the second film starring Isabelle Huppert to turn up here in the year-end movie season, though it was the first to be screened—it premièred at the Berlin Film Festival in February (I saw it there), while Paul Verhoeven's "Elle," which opened November 11th, was first shown at Cannes, in May. The overlaps are odd: both are set mainly in and around Paris; both feature Huppert as an intellectual woman living in bourgeois comfort; both show her character losing her mother, becoming a grandmother, forming an important relationship with a much younger man, and having a significant connection to a cat. Both films involve broken marriages, and both depict the pleasures and troubles of living alone.

It's almost as if these films were the result of an odd sort of commission—say, a contest in which the rules specified that the competing films must contain these elements, which the filmmakers could arrange and approach as they saw fit. They weren't, of course, but they might have been—both are the product of a French film industry that's struggling to maintain an artistic connection both with the history of cinema and with contemporary experience. Verhoeven's response is discomfort and sensationalistic, pseudo-transgressive provocation; Hansen-Løve's is comfort, albeit an earnest and hard-won comfort that reflects the connections and disconnections underlying its production.

In "Things to Come," Huppert plays Nathalie Chazeaux, a passionately dedicated high-school philosophy teacher (in French, high-school teachers are called "professeurs") who's also a devoted scholar—she's the author of a highly regarded textbook and the editor of a respected series of philosophical monographs. She's been married to another philosophy teacher, Heinz (André Marcon), for twenty-five years; they have two thriving children, a son and a daughter, who are on the cusp of adulthood. But then things start to fall apart. The world that Nathalie has constructed for herself begins to collapse in on her, and what she can salvage from the wreckage forms the very core of the film.

The film's first scene, set earlier in the family's life, involves a trip by ferry to visit the seaside grave of Chateaubriand; there, as the family leaves (prompted by the impatient children), Hansen-Løve superimposes the French title of the film, "L'Avenir" ("The Future"), on a shot of the grave. At the start, she gets the existential homework out of the way—the future for everyone is death—but the rest of the movie doesn't make too much of that ultimate fear (or ultimate absurdity). Rather, it stays close to the modest practicalities and arm's-reach ambitions that concern Nathalie while putting a few counterweights of idealistic passion into the balance. En route to the classroom, she's momentarily blocked by students protesting changes in the government's retirement policy; inside, she gives a lesson that involves a quotation from Rousseau about democracy; and on the way out she's visited by a former student, Fabien (Roman Kolinka), a talented young philosopher who writes for her monograph series but has dropped off the academic track in order to form an anarchist commune with his friends on a farm in rural France.

Meanwhile, Nathalie's settled existence is wrenched toward chaos by the confused terror of her elderly mother, Yvette (Édith Scob), a former model, now working occasionally as a movie extra, who is in physical, mental, and emotional decline. Interrupting one of Nathalie's classes with a phone call, Yvette declares that she's in the midst of attempting suicide yet again, and she ends up in a nursing home. After Yvette's rapid decline and sudden death, Nathalie, who has inherited her mother's cat, Pandora, must make the funeral arrangements, and, strangely, her relatively formal discussion with the priest delivers a crucial vision of the world according to Nathalie, and according to Hansen-Løve as well. Nathalie gives the priest (who didn't know Yvette) a brisk overview of her mother's life story, which the priest distills into bland homiletics at the funeral; as for Nathalie, she speaks at the cemetery, reading aloud from Pascal's "Pensées" but adding not a word of her own in tribute to her mother.

What's more, after her separation from Heinz (who leaves her for another woman), her quietly bitter astonishment morphs into defiant anger only after she notices that he has taken, from their home's highly packed bookshelves, some books of hers that also contained her notes. Also, Nathalie's editorial projects fall apart; her publisher, bending to the market, won't renew her textbook and won't continue her series of monographs. It's as if Nathalie's prodigious learning has taken the place of her own emotions, her own experience, and, stripping her of her books, Hansen-Løve proceeds to inflict pain and suffering on Nathalie in an effort to see what remains of her essential self. The answer that the filmmaker ultimately delivers could as well come from another French classic, "Candide," which Voltaire ended with the phrase "we must cultivate our garden."

Nathalie heads off to the country to visit Fabien and his colleagues, who are literally cultivating their garden—living rustically, bartering, debating whether to sign their collective texts or publish them anonymously. There, the city-raised Pandora rediscovers her instincts and becomes a free-range mouse-hunter. But, despite the young anarchists' confidently idealistic notion of their autonomy, the isolation of their garden is illusory: when Nathalie heads out to the countryside for a visit, she gets there by means of a swift modern train that arrives at a well-tended little station. The road from the station to the farm is well-paved. The surrounding hills and fields aren't the lair of marauders but a silently regulated and governed paradise.

Challenged nonetheless by Fabien about her own carapace of urbanity—the very mode of life that he repudiated in order to pursue radical action along with radical thought—Nathalie retreats to the home and the life that she knew. She is ultimately thrown back upon her teaching job (which she loves) and her family (including a newborn grandson). She tells Fabien that the entire point of her work as a teacher is to help students think for themselves; she's as devoted and caring a grandmother as she has been a mother. She sees the difference between Fabien's inchoate youth, where his wanderings and extreme exertions are less a throwing-off than a starting-out, and her own long-built way of life, which takes as much careful effort to sustain as does the communal garden. Whether it's the dollhouse-like school where Nathalie teaches or the august one where Heinz works, the manicured streets and parks where she talks with Fabien and where she takes her students for an informal class, or even the ferry and the monuments that dominate the landscape with culture and history, the infrastructure of modern life, as much intellectual as material, comes to the fore to mock the very notion of a natural purity awaiting revelation. Nathalie's true self is something outside herself—it's her job and her family, her learning and her talk, the outer face of her inner life. Yet this very realm of intimate activity is itself another illusory mode of autonomy, one that's no less of a ruse than the anarchy of Fabien's commune.

It's as if, in dramatizing the unchallenged comforts and practicalities of Nathalie's way of living and working, Hansen-Løve were dramatizing her own place in the French film world and, for that matter, justifying her own calm and externalized, unoriginal yet heartfelt, intelligent and empathetic artistry. The great merit of "Things to Come" is in its construction of the network of associations and activities that bind Nathalie to the world around her. That world, and the moral trials imposed by its sudden absence, is where the filmmaker's passions and pleasures are found. Yet Hansen-Løve never gets to the soul of her protagonist—her film comes to life with Nathalie's own activity but doesn't reveal much about her in repose beside her baseline sense of humane decency. The film's modest aesthetic plays like a badge of virtue.

Hansen-Løve doesn't get to the material heart of the matter, either—the financial and administrative underpinnings of the French culture industry, which she did in fact unfold in fascinating detail in the first half of her film "The Father of My Children," from 2009. In "Things to Come," the enormous infrastructure of French society, economic and cultural, is shown to aim at nothing more than sustaining the comfortable yet compassionate private normalcy that the movie depicts. But the individual furies and passions that the mighty machine of that infrastructure is created to harness—or to restrain—are left unexplored.