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Having a Frankfurt School for Dummies on your bookshelf will come in handy when watching L’Avenir (Things to Come) (2016), which just won Mia Hansen-Løve the 2016 Berlinale Silver Bear for Best Director. This is a French film about Parisian philosophy teacher Nathalie (the formidable Isabelle Huppert) in a bourgeois midlife crisis, showing equal vulnerability and resilience, but do not be deterred by the potential for #FirstWorldProblems. Hansen-Løve, daughter of two philosophy professors, elegantly weaves thought and life into a universal tableau of loss, change, and affirmation that is reminiscent of Sebastián Lelio’s brilliant 2013 Chilean-Spanish Silver Bear winner Gloria.

Here’s a little primer on which philosophical and intellectual references to look for throughout L’Avenir – a film that still works without the subtext (a testament to Hansen-Løve’s directorial skill) but gains meaning with a basic understanding of the favorite authors that accompany Nathalie and inform her outlook on life.

The film opens on the rough and breathtaking Île du Grand Bé off the coast of Brittany, cut off from the mainland most of the time by the tide, where Nathalie continues the tradition of vacationing with her young family and visiting François-René Vicomte de Chateaubriand’s grave, the great French romanticist. Husband Heinz (perhaps named after Kohlberg’s moral Heinz Dilemma?) stays a moment longer at the tomb of the notorious philanderer-poet, his quiet reflectiveness foreboding the things to come in the film, crucially Heinz’ betrayal of his wife.

Frankfurt School dialectics as a method of examining and discussing rigidly opposing ideas in order to find the truth are the perfect backdrop to dissect the flexible relationships and moving dichotomies of life that pervade the film: men and women, husband and wife, mother and daughter, parents and children, teacher and student, woman and cat. And marketing versus content.

Significantly, the über-father of the 20th century Marxist Frankfurt School is ironically introduced while Nathalie is picking up some of her (last) books on Theodor W. Adorno from her publisher, whose marketing department is about to fire her because her textbooks are passé. Adorno was one of the most vocal critics of what he coined the “culture industry.” His main work on the subject has the subtitle “Enlightenment as Mass Deception” and pitches standardized mass culture against more complex “high arts.” One can’t help wondering what Adorno and Horkheimer would have made of the film’s sideswipe at the loud-mouthed 21st century Marxist pop star philosopher Slavoj Žižek, him of Sophie Fiennes 2006 documentary tour-de-force The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.

Thought and reality are inseparable for Nathalie, philosophy her life’s manual. If a question arises, she picks up a book. She reads “The Radical Loser,” an influential 10-year-old essay by Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, against the backdrop of her students’ social protest (which she objects to because it keeps them from learning). What radicalizes the isolated loser? is the question Enzensberger poses. The collective is the short-cut answer. Meanwhile Nathalie’s favorite former student, collaborator and confidant has turned Sturm und Drang anarchist communard. At his organic farm, where Nathalie takes refuge from the upheaval in her life – her settled and outdated “soixante-huitaires” 1968 student-movement spirit, her waning career, the end of her marriage, her two children’s growing up, her mother’s death – the teacher and student (symbols of the past and future?) will nearly have a falling out over the questions of radicality and whether thought or action change the world. Again, the bookshelf imitates life or vice versa: The liberal anti-Marxist French thinker Raymond Aron finds himself next to the Unabomber’s Manifesto in the intellectual farm- and publishing house’s shared living room.

18th century enlightened writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trailblazer of Enlightenment and the French revolution, at the core of French thought and values to this day, also keeps reappearing in L’Avenir. Nathalie confronts her students, so embroiled in the political affairs of the day, with a challenging quote on democracy from his seminal The Social Contract – warning them not to take it at face value, though: “It is against the natural order for the many to govern and the few to be governed. … Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men.”

When her husband tells her he is moving in with his lover, her stunned but composed response is, “I thought you would love me forever.” The soundtrack gently underscores the foreboding of change. Schubert’s lied “To Sing On The Water” ponders the overarching theme of the film, the passing of time, and summarizes Nathalie’s journey:

Tomorrow with shimmering wings

Like yesterday and today may time again escape from me,

Until I on towering, radiant wings

Myself escape from changing time.

The song has proven popular with filmmakers, previously used in Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (2000) and 14 years earlier in Masanori Hata’s The Adventures of Milo and Otis (1986).

Adorno most likely would have hated the pop music references in the film, but they give the viewers something to hang their hats on when they’re getting lightheaded from the philosophical heavyweights: Woody Guthrie’s 1951 protest song “My Daddy Keeps Your Daddy Up,” which would influence Bob Dylan, blasts from the students’ car radio while Nathalie first verbalizes her feeling of newfound freedom. Her inherited black cat Pandora finds her new freedom by running off into the woods.

One of the famous quotes from 17th century thinker Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, which appears on one of the film’s many bookshelves, is that “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Nathalie does this only once, for 10 seconds, contemplating the end of her marriage, before you can see her silently pull herself together, get up and carry on. Only a few more times is she shown quietly pensive and pausing, notably curled up in bed with the cat, crying, like her late mother used to do (her mother’s death and funeral are a non-event in the film and a chilling commentary on our fast-paced, matter-of-fact, non-commemorative culture). For a philosophy teacher, she is a woman of action more than thoughts or perhaps thought put into action, purposefully crossing the busy streets of Paris like the middle-aged class act she proves to be to the end.

The very few times emotions are outwardly running high emerge when the couple attempts to divide the philosophy books after their split. Nathalie is outraged at all the volumes Heinz pulled out of their joint shelves and joint lives. To comfort herself, she grabs Emmanuel Levinas, another 20th century Jewish philosopher, one who traded in love and guilt. Meanwhile Heinz is despairing over his lost Schopenhauer, the perennial 19th century German pessimist who influenced Nietzsche, Wagner and Beckett.

The couple’s last encounter closes a door. “Now that you have your Schopenhauer, all is good” are her sarcastic parting words as she sends Heinz packing while prepping the Christmas roast she will enjoy with the leftover family she wills into being, without him. In a satisfying reversal of fortunes, Nathalie adapts to the changes forced upon her, while Heinz – seemingly the agent of change — doesn’t.

“The future,” as the plain original French title literally translates, remains wide open. We see four generations in the film, all struggling in their own ways: Nathalie, her difficult aging mother, Nathalie’s somewhat distanced and bland son and daughter, and the daughter’s baby. As a first Christmas gift Nathalie gives her new grandson Plato’s Mysteries, only to be lovingly mocked by her son. Then the baby cries. In a nearly levitating final scene, The Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” accompanies grandmother Nathalie as she comforts her grandson:

Oh, my love, my darling

I’ve hungered for your touch

A long, lonely time

Time goes by so slowly

And time can do so much.

P.S. Don’t ask me what the cat meant.