Proxima (2020)

The latest film from writer-director Alice Winocour tells the story of Sarah, a French astronaut selected to spend a year on the International Space Station. At the height of her career, she is repeatedly faced with difficult choices in attempting to fulfill her roles as both a mother and an astronaut who is devoted to her own dreams of walking amongst the stars.
Winocour takes both mother and daughter on parallel journeys - in early scenes each gaze through glass walls at groups of males in their element, helplessly separated. As Sarah undergoes the arduous training process, readying her body for space, so too must her daughter Stella struggle with learning disabilities and low self-esteem to grapple with her schooling and social life. While the relationship between mother and daughter is at the forefront of marketing materials and provides focus for the screenplay, Winocour’s dedication to developing each of these characters individually into both believable and aspirational people is the finest element of her film. Their natural hurdles in achieving their goals establish two grounded and human characters who compel the viewer to empathise with challenges that are both a part of and far beyond those of their day-to-day lives.
Winocour states that she didn’t draw much inspiration from recent American films set in space because of their tendency to portray astronauts as super-human, she was instead artistically inspired by Tarkovsky’s character-driven Solaris. She has, however, created a film which fits will into a tradition of Hollywood pictures – from Cuaron’s Gravity and Nolan’s Interstellar, to Chazelle’s First Man and even the recent Brad Pitt vehicle Ad Astra – which all showcase fractured relationships between parents and children before an unearthly backdrop. Even Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi chiller Alien deals with anxieties about motherhood and the death of a symbolic family. What Winocour has to offer the genre is a fundamentally female perspective. The space genre has long been dominated by male voices, Sandra Bullock’s Ryan Stone in Gravity speaks the words of a male writing team and even Sigorney Weaver’s iconic Ellen Ripley was purposefully written in such a way that she could have been played by either a male or female actor. Winocour accentuates the female-specific challenges of space-travel, explaining in an interview that spacesuits are designed for male bodies, with the weight being distributed upon the shoulders while women possess naturally stronger hips. Her film achieves nuance by foregrounding the moments in which Sarah cannot keep up with the rigorous training, despite her determination. A lesser writer (or a male one writing woman, see Paul Feig) would probably have crafted a very uplifting but ultimately insincere story about a female astronaut who excels at everything – where girl power is the most powerful force in the universe – but Winocour doesn’t shy away from the practicalities of biology and in doing so imbues the girl power with realism.
Such realism extends to every shot in the film which frequently evoke the hand-held, verité style. From the preproduction stages, Winocour consulted closely with the European Space Agency, interviewing astronauts and scientists. A “documentary aspect” informs the film, as each stage of Sarah’s training process corresponds with the real-life process, and even the filming locations used being those of the authentic workplaces of space orginisations. Winocour compares the relationship between astrophysicists and astronauts to that of the cast and crew of a film – two groups of utterly dissimilar people working together for a common goal - and this is perhaps why the film will appeal to a far wider audience than just science fanatics. It’s often said that filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Alfred Hitchcock made films which metaphorically expressed their own relationships to filmmaking and cinema itself, the characters are co-workers, their characters’ struggles their own. Winocour’s own humanity is what brings Sarah to life, her own daughter was eight years old at the start of production. Sarah’s struggles may look like an astronaut’s but they are also a woman’s. She is constantly conflicted between her personal ambitions and her obligations to her child in the same way that any person dedicated to both career and family must be.
This is a strong film, building on cinematic history (perhaps unknowingly) with the raw materials of a real life. Proxima stays just on the right side of realism to fend off the threat of becoming overly sentimental but never does so at the expense of character or truth.