Mark Reviews Movies: PROXIMA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 5, 2020

The daughter asks the mother, "Will you die before me?" The answer from the mother is yes, although not for a long time, but the answer in Proxima is yes, although soon and in an indirect way.

The mother is Sarah (Eva Green), a French astronaut enlisted to pilot the final space mission before humanity endeavors to Mars. She and her fellow crew members, American Mike (Matt Dillon) and Russian Jurgen (Trond-Erik Vassal), will stay on the International Space Station for a year in an enclosed space, in order to test human tolerance for travel beyond the sight of Earth.

Writer/director Alice Winocour's film shows the three month preparation for this mission, and while it portrays the exhausting rigors of this training, the filmmaker frames this story in terms of Sarah's difficulties in adjusting to a life separated from her daughter Stella (Zélie Boulant). The two communicate via phone and letters, and although Stella is able to visit her mother a few times before the mission, those all-too short times together aren't enough to close the physical and emotional divide that comes between them.

This is, in a strange way, presented as a kind of limbo or even death. Sarah tries to focus on her training, but Stella's life, staying with her father (played by Lars Eidinger) in Germany, goes on, whether or not Sarah participates directly or indirectly in it. Absence from life is, after all, like a kind of death. Sarah must witness it.

There's a haunting montage of the girl, captured on video on her father's cellphone, enjoying life—laughing, playing, learning to ride a bike. Sarah is missing out on this while she's on the planet. How much more will the astronaut miss while she's trapped in space? The daughter becomes angrier and more distant in these three months. What will remain of their relationship after another year?

Such questions are at the heart of the film, which plays as a somber mood piece of isolation and almost existential fear. Green taps into Sarah's internal conflict—between a lifelong dream and her maternal love—with considerable depth, and Winocour evades any kind of sappiness or melodrama in presenting the mother-daughter relationship and the challenges that put it to the test. As a result, Proxima is a thoughtful film, not about space, but about the physical and emotional spaces between people.

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