‘Proxima': Failed Feminist Space Opera is Too Naive [Review]

Alice Winocour’s “Proxima” posits itself as an intimately feminist space opera; ambitious astronaut Sarah (Eva Green), chosen as a replacement for an astronaut who wasn’t cleared for flight, finally gets her due to be part of the last exploratory mission for the first manned mission to Mars. The problem is that Sarah’s maternal care gets in the way. Her tween daughter, Stella (Zélie Boulant), may very well be an issue as the launch nears. Sarah doesn’t seem to cope too well with all the separation anxiety, even when she travels for work to Europe you can sense the psychological toll the yearlong separation in space would do to this overbearing mother. Of course, a spaceflight is not confirmed until the grueling process of qualifying for it. has ended, and Wincour tries to show us, a little too unsubtly, the sexism that Sarah has to endure to go to the Red Planet, including a smug American mission captain (Matt Dillon), who spews sexist remarks towards her and is clearcut in his bias of a woman tackling on this mission. Although set in the future, it seems as though time, despite many women having already flown in space, has not changed the biased gender ideals men have had towards women. Alas, the internal battle the film lays out, all going on in Sarah’s vulnerable psyche, between maternal obligation and career aspiration, falls short of immediacy and fails to play out as any sort of thoroughly revealing feminist cinema. This is not new territory, and “Proxima,” co-written by Winocour and Jean-Stéphane Bron, depicts Sarah’s inability to be separated from Stella with the kind of restraint, but unabashed dullness that happens when you politicize your movie too heavily. Sarah isn’t shy in her clearcut desire to go to space, a lifelong dream, and yet clearly cannot let go of Stella for a few hours without freaking out, even arranging for the girl to sit with her in classified meetings. This all renders the film’s conclusion clunky and implausible— the viewer can only imagine what 365 days out in space without her daughter would do to this poor woman. [C]