Starring Isabelle Huppert. In French, with English subtitles. Rated PG

With her elegant ice crust covering inward heat, Isabelle Huppert is so masterful at playing remote characters you could miss the complexity of what she accomplishes on-screen. The ageless French star has rarely tackled roles as seemingly similar as those in Paul Verhoeven’s upcoming Elle—in which she appears as a wealthy Parisian literature professor turned game-company owner with a taste for kinky bouts—and Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come, where she plays a wealthy Parisian philosophy teacher.

Both women have ailing mothers, grown children, and weak husbands. And they both get stuck with Mom’s cat, too. Where her Elle character is artlessly thorny with family, friends, and colleagues, however, Huppert’s Nathalie is generally accommodating, even if her passions don’t run very high in any direction. She’s scarcely more perturbed when her formerly companionable husband (André Marcon) suddenly announces his departure than when the company that usually publishes her philosophical tracts gets overrun by dimwitted 20-somethings.

Nathalie is patient with her drama-queen mother (Edith Scob, whose career began in 1959) and mildly doting with her own offspring. But this popular professor has a special interest in one of her ex-students, a talented writer called Fabien, who has given up academia to join a self-styled “anarchist commune” in the French countryside. She jumps on a super-modern train to their outpost, which resembles late 1968, especially when the assorted Euro castoffs there start drinking wine and arguing Schopenhauer. Do their maunderings, or even their potentially erotic adventures, really matter to her?

Roman Kalinka, the lanky James Taylor type who plays Fabien, was part of an electronica-DJ collective in Eden, Hansen-Løve’s previous movie. Only 35, she has made five distinctly different features, and is married to veteran director Olivier Assayas. She appears to have thought a lot about art, comfort, and our inevitable disquiets—commonplaces that are hard to capture in cinema. The French title, by the way, translates as The Future. They might as well call it Mortality, and yet the movie brims with its own quiet fire.