Mia Hansen-Love
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Cannes 2022: One Fine Morning, Armageddon Time
One Fine Morning, Mia Hansen-Løve’s eight feature, messily synthesizes familiar recurring autobiographical threads. The writer-directors’s parents were philosophers whose divorce was traced over in the excellent Things to Come. Isabelle Huppert stood in for her mother there; One Fine Morning takes the daughter’s perspective, with Hansen-Løve rendered as translator Sandra Kinsler (Léa Seydoux). With father Georg (Pascal Greggory) increasingly hollowed out by a rare neurodegenerative disease, Sandra and her mother, Georg’s ex-wife Françoise (Nicole Garcia), are forced to make a number of draining caretaking decisions. (In the press kit, Hansen-Løve says she was “partly inspired by my father’s illness while he was still alive.”) When the understandably stressed […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 20, 2022 -
Back to One, Episode 174: Vicky Krieps
Phantom Thread solidified Vicky Krieps as an acting force to be reckoned with. Her incredible performance in that film felt new, like a beginning of sorts. Her latest is Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island. She talks about figuring out ways to turn the difficulties of that production into opportunities to create something magical. Plus she gives us a glimpse inside her process-less process, made up of deconstruction, openness, acceptance, listening, embracing chaos, exploding the method, living with failure, holding space for the unknown, and letting intuition lead the way. Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, including […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Oct 19, 2021 -
Trailer Watch: Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island
Writing out of Cannes, Blake Williams reviewed Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest, Bergman Island, a meta-fictional drama about a female filmmaker’s marriage to a fellow director and the ways in which she mines her life, creative anxieties and influences for narrative material. About the film, which jumps between the filmmaker’s (played by Phantom Thread‘s Vicki Krieps) exploration of the Baltic island where Ingmar Bergman lived and shot several of his films, her conversations with her partner (Tim Roth) about her efforts to crack her third act, and imagined scenes from the film to be, which feature Mia Wasikowska and Joachim Trier-regular Anders […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 7, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 3: Drive My Car, Bergman Island
“I am not really necessarily interested in performance, per se, but in emotion,” Ryûsuke Hamaguchi told Vadim Rizov back in 2019 when asked how meaningful the work of Jacques Rivette was to him. The answer went on to more or less say “not very,” which is even more incredible now that his new three-hour Murakami adaptation, Drive My Car, has landed, so absorbed with the art and nuances of rehearsal and performance that the French New Waver will inevitably be the default assumed touchstone once again. Indeed, Drive My Car is, along with its 40-page source material (found in Murakami’s […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 13, 2021 -
TIFF 2018 Critic’s Notebook 6: Maya, A Million Little Pieces
Mia Hansen-Løve is on my shortest list of favorite working filmmakers; after the extremely strong opening one-two of All is Forgiven and The Father of My Children, Goodbye First Love and Eden were whiffs. She came back strong with Things to Come, and now there’s Maya, almost certainly destined to be the most poorly-received of her films to date, in part for reasons that I’ll get into below. It appears, talking to a lot of colleagues, that they simply didn’t think the film was very good, but I liked it a lot: Maya‘s got unexpectedly strange energy, does a number of things Hansen-Løve hasn’t done before […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 11, 2018 -
Examined Life: Mia Hansen-Løve on Things to Come
There are only a few minutes of calm at the beginning of Mia Hansen-Løve’s fifth feature Things to Come. In a prologue two years before the film’s narrative kicks off, philosophy professor Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) is on seaside vacation with longtime partner Heinz (André Marcon) and children, a stroll reminiscent of the family outing that kicks off her sophomore film, 2009’s The Father of My Children. In both films, this stroll prefigures much strife to come: shortly after Things’ opening, Nathalie — already frayed by the demands of looking after her elderly mother (Edith Scob) — finds out Heinz is […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 20, 2016 -
Things to Come Writer/Director Mia Hansen-Løve on Pain, Acting, and Embracing Complexity
After winning the Silver Bear for Best Director earlier this year at her world premiere in Berlin’s 66th International Film Festival, Mia Hansen-Løve brings her latest picture, Things to Come, to the New York Film Festival’s main competition slate on October 14th. Starring Isabelle Huppert in an arresting performance as Nathalie, a Parisian philosophy professor, Hansen-Løve’s film follows Nathalie as she picks up the pieces of her life even as it is disassembling. While her mother is sick, her job is compromised, and her husband is leaving her, Nathalie forges ahead, carving a new, albeit unfamiliar course for her future. In […]
by Taylor Hess on Oct 13, 2016 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 0: The Salesman, Aquarius, Things to Come, Elle
This first dispatch cheats a bit, as will the next few: there was an embarrassment of riches this year in NYC as far as pre-TIFF/long-lead screenings go, so I started writing up the festival before actually getting there to give myself a head start — today’s dispatch, hitting before the festival technically kicks off, digs into some of the Cannes/Berlin titles that are crammed into marathon competitive P&I slots on day one proper. This is my first year attending TIFF, and as excited as I am to finally be attending, it’s inevitable that doing daily coverage will take its toll. Local color perhaps […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 7, 2016 -
Lose Yourself to Dance: Mia Hansen-Løve on Eden
French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve makes movies about walking and not talking. About the unsaid stuff that underpins everyday life, that tacitly ferries us toward and away from life’s big dramas: love, first love, broken love, careers as they peak and wane, reunions and ennui, death, family. Hers is a world where the moving image, like life, is animated not by the noise that accompanies celebration and turbulent times, but by time itself. So much so that Hansen-Løve’s four features, All Is Forgiven, The Father of My Children, Goodbye First Love and her most recent, Eden, span years, sometimes decades — […]
by Durga Chew-Bose on Apr 28, 2015 -
Sundance 2015, Dispatch 1: Best of Enemies and Eden
Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s documentary Best of Enemies, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, details the particulars of the eight televised debates between William Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal held on ABC in 1968 — four during the Republican convention in Miami, another four during the infamous Democratic one in Chicago. A very prototypically Sundance-y doc (destined for TV and classrooms, “audience-friendly”), this is a consideration of an Important Topic fleshed out with contextual talking heads and zipped up into a brief, digestible package. Given sufficient interest in the subject, it’s the kind of thing I’d generally watch on […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 24, 2015
