Hansen-Love, Mia

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    ‘One Fine Morning’ Review: The Moments That Make Up a Rich Life

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    Mia Hansen-Love directs Léa Seydoux in a delicate look at a mother, daughter and lover whose quotidian existence is instantly recognizable yet sublime.Sandra, the French single mother at the center of “One Fine Morning,” is always in motion, striding here and there, racing up and down, circling back and forth, and always with an intensity of purpose. With her head held high and her clear, unwavering gaze, a dowdy backpack strapped to her back, she doesn’t resemble one of pop culture’s fantasy gamines. She looks like the woman she is: a mother, daughter, friend, lover and worker who, in order to keep going, needs to maintain a steady course even when buffeted by strong winds.Sandra is an appealing, sympathetic character, a rich mix of complexity and familiarity that the director Mia Hansen-Love — and her star, the great Léa Seydoux — subtly reveal in fragments. Much happens in the story, often quietly. Yet while the movie occasionally surprises, what distinguishes it, giving it unexpected force, are less the kind of life-altering events that are generally regarded as milestones. Instead what matters here is the delicacy with which Hansen-Love puts those events into play with modest moments, how she reveals the sublime in the in-between spaces of ordinary existence.A widow, Sandra lives in a bright, modestly cramped Paris apartment with her cheerful young daughter, Linn (Camille Leban Martins). Much of Sandra’s time — her many comings and goings — involves her family, though mostly her father, Georg (an affecting Pascal Greggory). A philosopher, Georg has been diagnosed with Benson’s syndrome, a degenerative ailment that’s robbing him of his memory and sight. The movie opens with Sandra visiting her father, whose condition is so dire that she needs to guide him on how to let her inside. “Where is the …” he says, his voice trailing off. “The key?” she asks. “In the lock,” she continues from one side of a shut door that now feels like a wrenching divide.The story is simple and its telling generally restrained even as Sandra’s life begins to take a turn for the progressively more complicated. There are arguments and spilled tears, but Hansen-Love’s touch here is insistently discreet and light, which remains true even as the narrative begins to unobtrusively divide into separate tracks. One involves Sandra’s anguished relationship with Georg, while the other centers on a love affair that she begins with an old friend, Clément (Melvil Poupaud). Each relationship pushes and pulls at Sandra, who’s saying a slow goodbye to one love even as she’s finding a new one.Like Hansen-Love’s direction, Seydoux’s performance has a calm, understated quality that helps gives the movie a natural, comfortable flow. Sandra, who works as a translator, is almost always moving somewhere or toward something — her father, her daughter, her job — and because Hansen-Love likes medium and long shots, your attention tends to be concentrated on Sandra, her body and movements. You see her, but you specifically see her in the world, at her home, on the job, though mostly amid her family, friends and colleagues. You see, in other words, all the many pieces that make up a life.One of the pleasures of “One Fine Morning” is how it sneaks up on you emotionally. The scenes between Sandra and her father are expectedly poignant, true. Yet what makes them resonate is how Sandra resolutely maintains her focus and composure even in the face of mounting catastrophe, how she tries to help Georg navigate his rapidly fading world. She patiently helps him recover his lost words, holding it together even as his condition worsens and the family decides to move him into a nursing home. Despite some low-key family tension, most generated by her carelessly self-involved mother (an amusing Nicole Garcia), Sandra seems so unflappable that you sense (worry) that a part of her has shut down.The movie builds incrementally through scenes of varying dramatic and emotional intensity, some of which might seem like atmospheric filler (or just filler) in a different movie but here deepen the story. Again and again, Hansen-Love returns to the subject of memory, to the past and the ebb and flow of time. In one sequence, Sandra serves as a translator for an audience of American World War II veterans, mirror images of her father and grandmother, whom she later visits. When Sandra asks how she is, carefully taking a fragile, translucent arm, the older woman haltingly replies, “It’s a bit difficult at times … living.”In her pursuit of uninflected naturalism, Hansen-Love has sometimes been a more interesting than wholly successful filmmaker (her second feature, “The Father of My Children,” is lovely), but “One Fine Morning” is beautifully balanced, persuasive and moving. Much of what occurs is familiar, including Sandra’s affair, which Hansen-Love makes specific and different simply by where she lays the stress and how. The story’s ellipses and graceful structure are certainly admirable, but what elevates “One Fine Morning” is the texture of Sandra’s emotions, the revelation of her character, the hunger of her embrace, the wildness of her mouth, the stillness of her sated body, and the love that she gives and will movingly embrace once more.One Fine MorningRated R for some partial female nudity. In French, English and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘All Is Forgiven’ Review: A Distinctive First Feature

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      A father with a drug problem tries to reconnect with his daughter.Mia Hansen-Love’s latest film, “Bergman Island,” is a simultaneously enigmatic and provocative treatment of the knotty intertwining of life and art. Her first feature, “All Is Forgiven,” from 2007, is getting its U.S. debut this week, and it confirms that the writer-director’s beguiling (and to some, confounding) cinematic voice was all but fully mature from the start.For its first two-thirds, “All Is Forgiven” commits to an impartial portrayal of Victor (Paul Blain, rock-star charismatic), a would-be writer and feckless recreational drug user. Bouncing between Vienna and Paris with his Austrian partner, Annette (Marie-Christine Friedrich), and their precious 6-year-old daughter, Pamela, Victor finds that descending into full-time junkiedom is like falling off a log. His love for his wife and daughter is sincere, but in the face of his need for heroin, it ceases to matter. His dishonesty is unblinking and his violence unthinking. Hansen-Love depicts it all without a flinch.The movie then jumps 10 years ahead. As with her film “Eden” (2015), the director does nothing to visibly age her adult actors; the space they inhabit is a circumscribed cinematic one, not a simulation of a realistic timeline. But Pamela has grown into a teenager (played by Constance Rousseau, the older sister of Victoire Rousseau, who plays the character as a child), and a now-cleaned-up Victor is eager to reconnect with her. Intrigued but cautious, Pamela agrees to meet, over her mother’s objections.Those familiar with Hansen-Love’s other films will not be too surprised that her scenario withholds certain story components that other directors might consider essential. Her movies have a delicacy of style that can make them seem gossamer-thin at first. But the atmosphere the director creates, once fully breathed in, has an emotional gravity that becomes devastating as it settles.All Is ForgivenNot rated. In French and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters and on Metrograph’s virtual cinema. More

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      When Women Filmmakers Get to Tell Their Origin Stories

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      Movies about men who make movies are common, but female auteurs don’t often get such chances. That’s just one reason two new releases are so surprising.The newly released “The Souvenir Part II” and “Bergman Island” are both films by modern masters that not only delve into the filmmaking process but also draw from the personal lives of the filmmakers themselves.Sound familiar? Self-reflexive movies like these practically double as auteurist rites of passage — think “8 ½,” Federico Fellini’s beguiling ode to creative block with Marcello Mastroianni playing a version of the filmmaker; “Day for Night,” François Truffaut’s chaotic comedy about artistic collaboration starring Truffaut himself in the on-camera director’s chair; and, more recently, “Pain and Glory,” Pedro Almodóvar’s melodrama about an aging filmmaker (Antonio Banderas) in crisis. The list goes on, but with the newest films, there’s a crucial distinction: the masters in question are women.Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir Part II” and Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island” revolve around two women filmmakers, avatars for the directors, navigating their desires, relationships and creative pursuits in ways that fully reinvigorate the self-referential genre. Spotlighting the intellectual doubts and processes of two very different types of women, these films also raise subtle questions about gender disparity in the movie business and the unique ways in which women artists come into their own. And refreshingly, these films never dabble in obvious, self-congratulatory screeds about sexism — theirs is a magic much more potent and revelatory.“The Souvenir Part II” is the follow-up to Hogg’s 2019 drama about a soft-spoken student filmmaker who falls into a fraught and ultimately tragic romance with an alluring heroin addict. The new movie again draws generously from Hogg’s early years attending the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, England. Still reeling from her lover’s death, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) must build herself back up. The demands of completing her thesis film — a relationship drama based on her memories, that is, the events of the first film — propel her to become a more self-assured individual, transformed by the cathartic powers of creative work. In the end, the presentation of Julie’s finished film doubles as a plunge into her subconscious, a Technicolor fantasia akin to the deliriously joyous endings of golden age movie musicals and a brilliant shorthand for the marriage of art and life.In the press notes, Hogg said that despite being “terribly introverted” in film school, she had “a very clear idea of where I wanted to go, so I was able to blank out the voices, usually of men, that said ‘you can’t do a film like that.’”Indeed, we see Julie contend with skepticism from her own cast and crew, sharing their doubts about her directorial style behind her back or directly to her face in one particularly blustery spat initiated by a boorish male colleague. In conversation with an academic advising committee, Julie must stand her ground in the face of dubious filmmaking veterans accustomed to certain rigid practices.Hogg’s methods are highly improvisatory — her scripts contain little dialogue and are instead filled with descriptions, references to particular memories and images that might encourage ad-libbing and a more organic kind of creation.Now 61, and decades into her career, Hogg has room to experiment. Though she’s not exactly working on expensive and elaborate studio films, she enjoys privileges and leeway not typically afforded to female directors.Vicky Krieps, left, and Tim Roth are a filmmaking couple in Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island.”IFC Films, via Associated PressTo this day the word “auteur” brings to mind a boy’s club. Consider how new films by male directors labeled visionaries like Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, or Wes Anderson are treated as events. The cult of male genius more pertinently extends to the kinds of money, time and space given for such so-called genius to flourish. Correcting the gender imbalance in the film industry isn’t just a matter of creating more opportunities for women — in effect meeting quotas — but believing in the unique visions of women artists and robustly investing in the cultivation of those visions.Hogg and Hansen-Love are hardly the only women filmmakers to get personal and explore the emotional twists and turns in getting a new movie off the ground. The work of the provocateur Catherine Breillat often has an autobiographical bent. Her “Abuse of Weakness” (2014) starred Isabelle Huppert as a filmmaker who experiences a stroke, as Breillat did, and in “Sex Is Comedy” (2004), the director restaged the behind-the-scenes drama leading up to the filming of one of her most infamous sex scenes. Cheryl Dunye’s “The Watermelon Woman” (1997) starred the director as a video store worker struggling to make a documentary about a forgotten actress from the 1930s. The recent restoration and release of “The Watermelon Woman” certainly helped pull Dunye’s ingenious autofiction out of obscurity. Nevertheless portraits of female filmmakers aren’t exactly well known or particularly numerous.The discrepancies between the way male and female filmmakers are treated are put under a magnifying glass in “Bergman Island.” Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth), directors both, retreat to the island where Ingmar Bergman shot several of his films in order to focus independently on their new scripts. Mia Hansen-Love, who was in a 15-year relationship with the filmmaker Olivier Assayas (“Irma Vep,” “Personal Shopper”), shows Chris procrastinating and suffering from extreme writer’s block, while Tony diligently fills page after page of his notebook with sexually questionable material. Ah, to be an auteur! As Chris, riddled with self-doubt, wastes time exploring the island on her own terms, the more well-known Tony hosts public Q. and A.’s and fields compliments from devoted fans. And when Chris finally shares the details of her latest idea for a movie, Tony seems distracted.No matter, Hansen-Love seems to say. If not Tony, the audience will be fully captivated by Chris’s dream world. A film-within-a-film unfolds, a sweltering romance between a younger couple (Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie) that also takes place on Faro Island and seems to reconfigure Chris’s frustrations and anxieties into new and visceral form.Both “Bergman Island” and “The Souvenir Part II” show an intimate understanding of art’s liberating potential, the power that fiction and fantasy afford individuals still in search of themselves. These aren’t exclusively female ventures — anyone who understands what it means to be diminished and looked down upon will find solace in the possibility of an alternative, an outlet for self-expression that transforms trauma and fear and insecurity into a source of fulfillment and strength.Crucially, Julie and Chris aren’t shown reveling in the success of their films, getting revenge on their male skeptics, or landing multimillion-dollar deals. Their triumphs are private, premised as they are on the satisfaction of creating something true and beautiful in spite of their vulnerable creators — Chris falls asleep in Bergman’s study and awakens in the future as her own film shoot comes to a close, her husband’s approval and the towering cinematic figure so central to her artistic development a twinkle in the past. We’re in her territory now. More

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      ‘Bergman Island’ Review: Love Among the Cinephiles

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      In Mia Hansen-Love’s new film, Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth play filmmakers on the rocks in the Baltic Sea.“This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your innermost imaginings of forms, proportions, colors, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections.” That is Ingmar Bergman, in his memoir “The Magic Lantern,” rhapsodizing on his “secret love,” the island of Faro in the Baltic Sea. Starting in 1960 with “Through a Glass Darkly,” he shot many of his films on Faro and died there in 2007.In “Bergman Island,” Mia Hansen-Love’s slippery and enchanting new movie, Faro, an austere and forbidding presence in much of Bergman’s work, is revealed as a pilgrimage spot for cinephiles and an appealing seaside destination for less obsessive travelers. Visitors can browse in the gift shop and the library, watch movies in Bergman’s personal screening room, or pile into a bus for the guided “Bergman Safari” (an actual annual event). They can also swim, drink, play Ludo and shop for sheepskins.Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) do some of those things, but they’ve come to Faro mostly to work. Filmmakers with screenplays at various stages of completion, they install themselves in the cottage where some of “Scenes From a Marriage” was filmed. The caretaker who shows them around cheerfully describes it as “the movie that caused millions of people to divorce.” (I wonder if the recent HBO remake will have the same impact.)An unmarried couple with a young daughter (she is staying with a grandmother while her parents are in Sweden), Chris and Tony have perhaps unwittingly arrived at a crisis in their relationship. They are affectionate and easy with each other, but the combination of Chris’s restlessness and Tony’s complacency suggests that things are not quite right between them.In Bergman’s films, love is a volatile element, as often as not a catalyst for emotional anguish and psychological disintegration. A man and a woman in a movie with his name on it are unlikely to find much peace. But Hansen-Love, though she is interested in the gloomy Swede and his legacy, is hardly in his thrall, and Chris and Tony don’t live in anything like the state of metaphysical extremity that so often afflicts Bergman characters.Chris is a passionate movie lover who is nonetheless skeptical of the power of the medium, and “Bergman Island” explores her ambivalence in a playful, critical spirit. She is bothered by the fact that Bergman, the father of nine children with six women, pursued his art at the expense of his family obligations. No woman would have been able to get away with that, she says, a complaint that is met with the usual shrugs, jokes and condescension from Tony and their dinner companions.She acknowledges the difference between art and life, but nonetheless wishes for a measure of “coherence” between them. The possibility of such a thing becomes more than just a theoretical question in the second half of “Bergman Island,” when the as-yet-unmade film that Chris is still struggling to write takes over the screen.That movie-within-the-movie, also set on Faro, involves a young woman — also a filmmaker — named Amy (Mia Wasikowska), who travels to the island for the wedding of a friend and encounters Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), the great love of her life. The two of them met as teenagers and all these years later, even though they are committed to other people, find that they just can’t quit each other.Their passionate, guilty romance — and Amy’s blondness — tilt the story closer to Bergman territory than Chris and Tony’s passive-aggressive courtesies, but the more obvious cinematic reference lies closer to home. Chris’s film is in effect a sequel to Hansen-Love’s “Goodbye First Love,” which followed adolescent lovers into young adulthood.The connection between the movie Chris dreams up and the one she’s in seems both elusive and obvious, as do the possible autobiographical implications of “Bergman Island.” Can it be entirely coincidental that Amy is a near-anagram of Mia, the name shared by Wasikowska and Hansen-Love? Is Tony a stand-in for Olivier Assayas, the French filmmaker with whom Hansen-Love has a child? Are we approaching Bergman’s landscape of doubling and collapsing identities from a different angle?But there are also intriguing hints that Chris and Tony’s story may itself be a kind of film-within-the-film, this one conjured out of Tony’s imagination. When Chris asks about his project, he answers that it’s about the unspoken meanings that circulate through the daily life of a couple, a description that fits the first half of “Bergman Island” almost too neatly. He also explains, during a Q.-and-A. session after a screening of one of his movies, that he tends to identify with his female characters. Does this make Chris his alter ego?To her credit, Hansen-Love doesn’t turn “Bergman Island” into a self-conscious philosophical puzzle. It unspools with an easy, fresh-air naturalism against a picturesque backdrop that doesn’t necessarily conform to anyone’s innermost imaginings. The mood, underscored by Robin Williamson’s sprightly music, is mainly comical, and the artists — Tony and Chris, at least — seem more playful than tormented, even at difficult moments.That may be because they both understand the paradox that “Bergman Island” so brilliantly enacts. It’s a movie that isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be one, or which one it wants to be. Which makes it feel like more than just a movie.Bergman IslandRated R. Cries and whispers. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      In-Person New York Film Festival Unveils Lineup

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      Opening with Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” the event will include the body horror tale “Titane” and the Harlem Renaissance adaptation “Passing.”The Cannes Palme d’Or winner “Titane,” about a serial killer with rather unorthodox sexual tastes, and the Sundance critical hit “Passing,” an adaptation of the Harlem Renaissance novel by Nella Larsen, are among the highlights of the 59th New York Film Festival, organizers announced on Tuesday.After last year’s virtual edition, screenings will be held in-person with proof of vaccination required, although there will be some outdoor and virtual events. (More details on pandemic protocols will be released in the coming weeks.)As previously announced, “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Joel Coen’s solo directing debut, will play opening night, Sept. 24. A take on the play by Shakespeare, it stars Denzel Washington in the title role and Frances McDormand, the director’s wife, as Lady Macbeth. The centerpiece of the festival will be “The Power of the Dog,” the first Jane Campion film in more than a decade, and “Parallel Mothers,” from Pedro Almodóvar, will be the closing-night title.The main slate will feature a mix of premieres and highlights from earlier festivals. The body horror tale “Titane” made headlines last month when its director, Julia Ducournau, became only the second woman (after Campion in 1993) to win Cannes’ top prize. Other titles from the French festival heading to New York include “Benedetta,” Paul Verhoeven’s 17th-century lesbian nun potboiler; “The Souvenir Part II,” Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to her 2019 semi-autobiographical drama about a film student in 1980s London; and “The Velvet Underground,” Todd Haynes’s documentary about the band synonymous with Andy Warhol’s New York.From Sundance, “Passing,” directed by the actress Rebecca Hall, who adapted Larsen’s 1929 novel, stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as childhood friends who reconnect from opposite sides of the color line. Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated “Flee,” which won the Sundance world cinema documentary prize, focuses on a gay Afghan refugee in Denmark.Other titles of note include Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island,” starring Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth; the comic-drama “Hit the Road,” from Panah Panahi, son of the Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi; and two films from the Korean director Hong Sangsoo, “In Front of Your Face” and “Introduction.”Passes are on sale now; tickets to individual films will go on sale Sept. 7. Go to filmlinc.org for more details. More