Prox­i­ma

When Sal­ly Ride was going to become the first Amer­i­can woman to go to space in 1983, NASA engi­neers hit a wall with a ques­tion that baf­fled them as much as any equa­tion. How many tam­pons should they send with her for a one-week mis­sion? They num­ber they land­ed on was 100.

Alice Winocour’s third fea­ture, Prox­i­ma, con­tin­ues a con­ver­sa­tion about the very real lega­cy of astro­physi­cists and engi­neers and their strug­gle to accom­mo­date female astro­nauts. Eva Green plays Sarah, an ambi­tious sin­gle moth­er to Stel­la (Zelie Boulant-Lemesle).

At the begin­ning of Wincour’s film, Sarah’s life-long dream of going to space is final­ly going to hap­pen and she’s cho­sen to join the Prox­i­ma Mis­sion to the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion. It means months of gru­elling train­ing at the Euro­pean Space Agency in Rus­sia before lift-off and then sep­a­ra­tion from her daugh­ter by the long dark reach­es of space. But there’s no hes­i­ta­tion: this is what Sarah has been work­ing towards her whole life so Stel­la goes to live with her astro­physi­cist dad (Lars Eidinger).

Prox­i­ma draws an easy com­par­i­son to James Grey’s Ad Astra – both films about the loss of a par­ent to the dark­ness of space – but think less glossy sci­ence fic­tion and more ground­ed real­ism for Winocour’s film. Shot by French cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Georges Lechap­tois at a real train­ing facil­i­ty, Sarah’s world at the ESA is all metal­lic mono­chro­mat­ic blues and greys. There’s an empha­sis on the tac­tile day-to-day life of a train­ing astro­naut, with close-up shots of hel­met buck­les, clips and switches.

While Sarah gets to grips with the mechan­ics of get­ting to space, she also has to deal with her team­mates: the sup­port­ive Russ­ian, Anton Ochievs­ki (Alek­sey Fateev) and the chau­vin­is­tic Amer­i­can, Mike Shan­non (Matt Dil­lon), who is less enthu­si­as­tic she’s joined them. At their first meet­ing, Mike jokes to the room that Sarah will make a fine addi­tion to the team because he’s heard that French women are great cooks.

At train­ing, he advis­es Sarah take on less prepa­ra­tion before sug­gest­ing she’s a space tourist, dead weight on his mis­sion. While she’s bat­ting away sex­ist macro and microag­gres­sions in her male-dom­i­nat­ed work­place, Sarah’s rela­tion­ship with Stel­la is threat­en­ing to spin out of con­trol as parental promis­es keep being bro­ken. Green is at a career-best as the sto­ic Sarah, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly deter­mined and on the edge of break­ing. So often ham­ming it up in Tim Bur­ton roles, you for­get just how excep­tion­al­ly sub­tle she can be.

It would sell Prox­i­ma short to sug­gest the film is sim­ply a dilem­ma of career ver­sus moth­er­hood. Rather the film is about two things from two per­spec­tives. For Sarah it’s about say­ing good­bye and for Stel­la it’s about los­ing her moth­er. It’s a melan­cholic film that takes its time to get to its farewell, less showy than big­ger bud­get par­ent-in-space flicks like First Man and Grav­i­ty, but no less mov­ing. And unlike these films, Winocour makes the deci­sion to nev­er bring us to space. We’re left on the ground with Stel­la as her moth­er flies into the unknown and the loss is devastating.