Live, Laugh, (Mia Hansen-)Løve
A guide to the French filmmaker.
Happy Tuesday! Whether today is Valentine’s Day or Singles Awareness Day for you, I hope you’ll indulge me as I talk about love. That is … French director Mia Hansen-Løve!
You may recall that I interviewed Hansen-Løve last month for her latest film One Fine Morning, which has begun to trickle into theaters around the country. I have generally liked her work yet struggled to reach the same rapturous appreciation that greeted her in the critical and festival world. Thinking she’d at least be a good conversation, I took the interview with the idea that it’d be a nice opportunity to revisit her films again.
That experience of rewatching Hansen-Løve’s filmography has been one of the great joys of 2023 thus far. I’m convinced her films really need a second watch to fully understand what they’re doing. Not in a Christopher Nolan kind of way where you need a repeat viewing to understand the intellectual and narrative logic. Rather, it’s helpful to watch again to better understand the effortful emotional logic that might initially present as effortless.
Critic Katie Walsh made this wry observation, partially about One Fine Morning, and she’s not wrong about what the film is:
But beyond this humorously (and lovingly) reductive read of Hansen-Løve’s work, there is so much more underneath the surface. I realize that not everyone has time to watch movies twice, much less once, so my hope is that the below gives you helpful context as to how to watch a Mia Hansen-Løve movie — as well as why I’ve found them such an enriching, enlivening experience.
Her films are about the juxtaposition of events, not their accumulation.
This was perhaps the biggest key to unlocking Mia Hansen-Løve’s movies for me. Unlike so much of cinema, her films are not always about characters driven by a strong central want or desire that pulls them forward. While they are trying to make a life, it turns out that life just happens to them. Be it the family forced into turmoil by a sudden tragedy in The Father of My Children or a French DJ at the mercy of the whims of success in Eden, her protagonists must frequently face the humbling realization that they are not in control of their fate.
Such characters are often passive wallflowers in a more goal-oriented cinema like America’s, but they’re always compelling figures in Hansen-Løve’s work because she understands the inherent drama of everyday life. It’s about learning to find equilibrium amidst the chaos of what life throws at us. Her latest film One Fine Morning is like a thesis statement for the filmmaker’s entire career as Léa Seydoux’s widowed single mother Sandra Kinzler tries to make sense of how she can experience a rush of passionate romantic love at the same time her ailing father’s health takes a turn for the worse.
It’s the space between big moments where she finds some of the most moving, naturalistic moments.
Disciples of slow cinema or neorealism often mislearn the lessons of those cinematic movements. The small bits of life that most films elide are important to depict not because they bore or bemuse the audience with their banality. In Mia Hansen-Løve’s work, these transitory bits aren’t self-serving artistry but a recognition that these passages between spaces are where we process everything else in our lives. It’s here where we reveal our truest selves. I asked her about this fascination in regard to One Fine Morning specifically, but her answer opened up and applies to her entire oeuvre.
“I needed to see her moving to see her presence, to feel who she was. For me, it was just an obvious part of the story. Afterward, people mentioned it a lot—that it’s uncommon to see so much transportation in a film. And then I realized that there’s a lot of that in all of my films. If you’re interested in filming the life of people when it’s not spectacular—because I’ve always thought that there’s more truth about our life when we show moments that aren’t always dramatic—you have to film people walking or taking the bus.”
Her films often pull from real-life events.
No need to go to Mia Hansen-Løve’s Wikipedia page to look for Easter eggs. The autofiction of her filmography is not salacious gossip, although it’s definitely possible to read Bergman Island as a veiled allegory for her breakup with fellow French filmmaker Olivier Assays. (A seasoned teacher who seduces the young female protagonist in Goodbye First Love with his intelligence and insight might also be an Assayas stand-in.)
But it’s less important to know the real-life counterpart and more pertinent to recognize that if the films feel so much like reality, it’s because they’re close refractions of it. As she described in our interview:
“The films are never just like an imitation of reality to me. They want to find the truth, the quintessence of an experience. But to find that, it’s a process that involves a reinvention and using your imagination. It’s never purely transparent.”
One Fine Morning involves Seydoux’s Sandra navigating the impending demise of her father, something Hansen-Løve experienced herself during the pandemic. That sudden onset of intense emotion informs the performance as seen in a scene like this:
Her films involve characters with a strong tie to their vocation.
If you seek an obvious signpost that you’re a protagonist in a Mia Hansen-Løve film, it’s that you have a job that means a lot to your sense of self-worth. As she put it to me:
“I have always felt, almost like a handicap, that I could never make a film where a character doesn’t have some kind of vocation. I wish I could finally make a film where somebody has just a boring job that’s really not interesting, where real life comes after the job. A lot of people have jobs they don’t like and just do it in order to make money, and in most of my films, characters can go through that at some moments. But, in the end, they always have this vocation that they really want to pursue.”
These aren’t striving workaholics in the American sense who waste away all day on the edge of burnout. They’re people who find purpose in life — and perhaps a distraction from its complications — in the work they do. Be it a DJ in Eden, a philosophy professor in Things to Come, or a translator in One Fine Morning, they’re also often a close corollary to her own role as director. (The notable exception is, of course, Bergman Island, where Vicky Krieps’ Chris is a literal director.)
Her films end but don’t necessarily culminate.
After all I’ve said thus far, you probably weren’t expecting a Mia Hansen-Løve film to end with an end card “and they all lived happily ever after.” But even still, her work tends to just … trail off a bit. (For once, that’s not a pejorative!) The protagonists of both All Is Forgiven and The Father of My Children, her first two features, just wander off-screen before the credits begin to roll. “I think all of my films actually end […] in a way that you can feel life as if continues afterward,” Hansen-Løve observed about her endings to me. “They end on some kind of horizon opening [in the characters’ lives].”
The sentiment applies to scenes throughout her films, not just their final ones. Experiences do not map neatly to story beats like rising or falling action. An experience is simply an experience, tying into other ones in the past and pointing ahead to more in the future that remain unknown. Whether the characters greet this certainty with excitement or exhaustion reveals so much about them.
Her films speak to and build on one another (without being dependent on seeing them all).
I jokingly referred to a different kind of MCU where the “M” stands for “Mia Hansen-Løve,” not “Marvel,” and got a good chuckle out of her. She’s described building a body of work like constructing a house in the past, and she actually expounded upon that metaphor to me:
“I still have the same desire to build a body of work where all the films not only work as themselves—and I hope they do—but also work together and become like a family. In families, not everyone has a good relationship with everyone! [laughs] It doesn’t mean that it has to be in perfect harmony, but I like the idea that everything is a part of a big whole. I’ve always had the desire to make films that were one big film, like the film of life!”
So while these films may feel part and parcel of the same “French woman do some stuff” blueprint, they’re connected yet divergent in key ways. Mia Hansen-Løve, from her own vantage point, is collecting something of a cinematic corpus. She envisions Things to Come and One Fine Morning like a two-panel diptych, for example, examining self-actualization amidst parental loss from both a maternal and paternal angle.
Now, I just can’t wait to see what else Mia Hansen-Løve has in store for us.
So, where should I get started?
Provided you aren’t too close to your own teenage years, the best entry point for Mia Hansen-Løve’s movies is probably Goodbye First Love (available to rent). This tenderly observed coming-of-age story follows a girl trying to move forward but cannot ever fully untether herself from the mental stranglehold of her adolescent crush. While it’s not my absolute favorite of her films, this is perhaps the best introduction because it has one of her most propulsively forward-moving linear plots given its extended time horizon. Goodbye First Love brings real wisdom and perspective to how feelings evolve — or don’t — with age.
I’d then graduate to the aforementioned pairing of Things to Come (available to rent) and One Fine Morning (now paying in select theaters), which have more freeform narratives and will benefit from some preliminary exposure to the Hansen-Løve house style.
By now, you’d probably be ready for Bergman Island (available on Hulu) — a meta-narrative reflecting Hansen-Løve’s acceptance of her own unique process of moviemaking. It’s got a neat movie-within-a-movie structure that reflects the main frame’s central themes, which will mean all the more if you understand the kinds of movies the director actually makes.
While it ranks near the top of my own rankings, it’s probably now time for Eden (available for free with ads on Tubi) as a kind of B-side for Mia Hansen-Løve. It’s her only film to date with a male protagonist and features arguably the strongest character motivation as Parisian DJ Paul (loosely based on Hansen-Løve’s own brother) tries to breakthrough in the garage music scene. It’s a great party and music movie, yet the good times do not come at the expense of the filmmaking or storytelling.
You might next round out that first viewing of Goodbye First Love what Hansen-Løve described to me as a loose trilogy about young women, All Is Forgiven (available through Metrograph’s streaming service) and The Father of My Children (available to rent). I think both are more early-career curios than true breakthroughs, but each is still worth a watch.
Finally, only for the completists, there’s her odd 2018 misfire Maya (available to rent). This film only just came online in the United States for a reason. If you want to figure out why, I suppose you could watch it. (Here’s my assessment for /Film from that year’s Toronto International Film Festival.)
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
I could take or leave Your Place or Mine, but this conversation with its writer/director Aline Brosh McKenna is deeply insightful about the trends affecting the rise and fall of the theatrical rom-com:
I also enjoyed this piece of James Cameron content after an IMAX 3D viewing of Titanic (highly recommended):
This Film Comment roundtable on Magic Mike’s Last Dance was a great hashing out the merits and pitfalls of a film I mostly liked. Esther Zuckerman also had a great piece in The New York Times about how the series reflects a decade in the American economy.
I did not notice this because I was pretty detached from the abysmal Netflix original movie You People by the time this moment happened, but they apparently faked a kiss between two actors with CGI?! The Guardian breaks down this bizarre evolution of technology.
I suspect we’re only just getting the opening salvo in this debate explored in The New Yorker: “Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists?”
Subscribers got a fun expansion on the A24 ranking — an Oscars ceremony, but choosing only from the studio’s releases.
For Decider, I said stream it to Something in the Dirt (Hulu) and skip it to The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (Hulu).
Back this weekend with another bit of analysis on a French director whose work I think you should know!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall
Terms of Endearment destroyed me when I first watched it and now that I'm a parent I don't think I'll ever watch it again. I mostly like Mia Hansen-Love, I think Eden and Bergman Island are my favs from her.