L’Avenir and Simone de Beauvoir on Independence, Freedom and Happiness

Mia Hansen-Løve's film L’Avenir depicts a philosophy teacher, Nathalie Chazeaux, undergoing a serious existential crisis. Her husband Heinz ends their long marriage, her mother dies, and her book series is cancelled. Rather than despairing, Nathalie continues to pursue her projects and claims to be experiencing total freedom for the first time. Simone de Beauvoir contends in The Second Sex that in considering women's emancipation, we should not take happiness to be the aim, as it is a confining emotion. Instead, using the perspective of existentialist ethics, we should aspire to freedom. I examine how Beauvoir's distinctions between happiness, independence and freedom illuminate L’Avenir and how L’Avenir's portrayal of Nathalie's life crisis enhances understanding of their potential. We might see Nathalie as an example of what Beauvoir calls the independent woman and possibly even a free woman able to live without her ex-husband. I argue that closer analysis of the film does not support the view of Nathalie as completely free and happy. She herself says that older women are not valued, and she is harassed. Furthermore, the songs of lost love in the final scenes and the last shot of her living room with no-one in sight suggest her situation is ambiguous and that her Stoicism belies a loneliness and dread of the future.