Ursula Meier
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“The Search for Images is a Search That Can Last Forever”: Agnès Godard on The Line and Nenétte et Boni
Agnès Godard films the opening sequence of her fifth collaboration (following four features and a short) with writer-director Ursula Meier, The Line (La Ligne), in static slow motion: Margaret (Stéphanie Blanchoud) hits her mother (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), who falls and collides against the keys of her own piano, rendering her deaf in the impacted ear. A restraining order charges the eldest daughter not to come within 200 meters of her mother—an invisible boundary she immediately ignores with abrasive attempts to make amends until her younger sister paints a literal perimeter around the house. Margaret hovers at a little hill at one end […]
by A.E. Hunt on Mar 31, 2023 -
Ursula Meier and Agnes Godard on Sister
Switzerland’s submission for the best international picture is Ursula Meier’s Sister, starring the stunning and earthy Léa Seydoux as a Swiss hot mess and Kacey Mottet Klein as her weedy 12-year-old brother who supports them both through petty thefts. It’s a subtle, complex film that avoids obvious polarities of class, family, even landscape. As director Meier said to me recently of the mountain resort setting, and about finding her way into the script by focusing on the location of the ski lift cable cars, “It’s the place where he belongs, between two worlds. And it’s also the rhythm of the […]
by Miriam Bale on Oct 5, 2012
