Glasgow Film Festival review: Proxima

“There’s no such thing as the perfect astronaut, just like there’s no such thing as the perfect mother.,” a character tells Eva Green’s space-bound protagonist in Proxima. Receiving its UK premiere at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, Alice Winocour’s meditation on motherhood and space travel adds an intriguing dimension to the likes of First Man, Ad Astra, Gravity and Interstellar by keeping its focus on a parent preparing to separate from their child rather than coming to terms with those feelings of loss amid the celestial silence of the cosmos.

Eva Green stars as an astronaut preparing for a mission to the International Space Station in Proxima, the opening film of this year's Glasgow Film Festival.

Proxima ****

This is Eva Green’s Sarah, a French astronaut chosen to join a year-long mission to the International Space Station as part of the final stages of a Mars launch. Having trained her whole adult life to fulfil her childhood dream of travelling into space, Sarah doesn’t hesitate to accept the mission and, crucially, the film doesn’t judge her for making this decision, even though she’s also mother to a young daughter, Stella (Zélie Boulant-Lemesle), whom she co-parents with her ex.

Instead, the film zeroes in on the way entrenched attitudes towards professional women and working mothers in male-dominated fields (and society at large) start chipping away at her psyche at the very moment she needs to focus on the job at hand. The casual sexism of her fellow astronaut Mike Shannon (Matt Dillon), the scepticism of her trainers, even the little gender-specific ways the mission needs to be altered to accommodate her all compound to the guilt she’s already feeling about leaving Stella as she makes her final preparations under the glare of the world’s media.

Here Green is on brilliant form with a carefully calibrated performance that teases out the complicated and messy ways Sarah is both hampered by her bond with Stella and fuelled by it. But Winocour (who co-wrote the Oscar-nominated coming-of-age drama Mustang a few years ago) takes care to balance Sarah’s point of view with Stella’s so we get a proper sense of the anxiety she’s experiencing too. Shooting in actual European Space Agency training facilities in Germany, Kazakshtan and Russia, she also finds beauty in the real-world banality of these institutions, ensuring that, while she literally and figuratively keeps the film grounded by never actually taking us into space, its sense of wonder remains intact. Alistair Harkness