One Fine Morning aka Un Beau Matin

Clément, daughter Linn and Sandra lean over a gate

The latest report on Mia Hansen-Løve’s mission to keep alive a style of intimate, undemonstrative French cinema, One Fine Morning (Un Beau Matin) stars a highly impressive Léa Seydoux in a role that’s a world away from 007 glamour. Hansen-Løve is the daughter of philosophy professors and so in Seydoux’s Sandra Kienzler there’s every temptation to read-across from reality to fiction, particularly if you know that a) Hansen-Løve often draws from her own life, and b) she wrote the screenplay while her father was dying from Benson’s syndrome, a degenerative disease, which is exactly what Sandra’s father, a philosophy professor, is suffering from here. The film opens with Sandra (a shorn, dressed-down Seydoux) … Read more

Bergman Island

Chris and Tony

French writer/director Mia Hansen-Løve genuflects before the master, Ingmar Bergman, in her playful and reverential drama set on Fårö (pronounced foe-rer, more or less), the island where Bergman wrote and shot some of his films, and which is now dedicated to promoting his legacy. In meta fashion, Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony are a pair of film-makers arriving on Fårö to seek inspiration for the next projects they are working on. Renting the house where Bergman once shot parts of Scenes from a Marriage, or so they (and we) are told by the woman showing them around, they get down to work, him beavering away in the bedroom, her in the mill next … Read more

All Is Forgiven

Constance Rousseau as teenage Pamela

All Is Forgiven (Tout est pardonné) was the first feature Mia Hansen-Løve made, in 2007, when she was about 25/26. It’s an interesting debut and sets the tone for a career built on small, carefully crafted human-relationship dramas going for the slow burn rather than the big melodramatic bang. The Nordic name is a bit of a bum steer. Hansen-Löve is French, was born in Paris, and works in the distinctly French cinematic tradition, itself a continuation of the French literary tradition – Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola etc. Which is another way of saying that her films are about recognisable people having a bad time. Here it’s never really certain whether it’s the … Read more