Why we picked it – We have shown three of Mia Hansen-Løve’s films in past seasons. A naturalistic and moving story of how life’s joys and sorrows can be mixed together.
Synopsis – A young widow Sandra (Léa Seydoux), works as a works as a translator and interpreter, and lives with her eight-year-old daughter Linn. She is trying to cope with her father Georg, a former teacher of philosophy, now suffering from neurodegenerative disease. She meets a friend of her late husband, Clément, who is already married. They start to have an affair. Georg’s condition deteriorates and he needs full-time care in a nursing home. It’s a struggle to find a place and his house, with all his books, must be cleared. Sandra and Clément’s relationship is complicated by his reluctance to leave his wife.
The film – Mia Hansen-Løve was doing movie autofiction before it had a name. Here she uses her own experience caring for her father, Ole Hansen-Løve, also a philosophy teacher, after his diagnosis with Benson’s syndrome, the same disease that Georg has. Sandra’s pragmatism, caught between her child and a dependent parent, no doubt reflects Hansen-Løve’s own experience. Picturesque Paris and the problem of the married lover are not new settings, but there are modern touches: Linn skips happily out of a school-shooter drill and Sandra’s mother joins a chaotic protest. The film is firmly in the European arthouse cinema school to which Hansen-Løve belongs. With her Jean Seberg hairdo, Seydoux is a homage to Jean-Luc Goddard even before Georg quotes his line about every story needing a beginning, middle and end (but not necessarily in that order). If the film has a message it is that every end is also a beginning, regardless of where the middle is. In the interview below, Hansen-Løve discuss her approach to writing and the making of this film.
Director and Writer: Mia Hansen-Løve; Cinematography: Denis Lenoir; France 2022, 112 mins, 15