«We are going through a very moral moment»: Mia Hansen-Löwe Photo: Rij Schroer
If you didn't already know that Mia Hansen- Löwe was French, the films she makes will quickly clarify the situation.
Goodbye First Love (2011): A young woman has a passionate affair with her much older lecturer. Eden (2014): A 1990s house DJ has an existential crisis. Things to Come (2016): Isabelle Huppert plays a philosophy teacher. At least on the surface, Hansen-Loewe's films are le septième art exactly comme il faut: effortlessly sexy and intelligent, with a melancholy charm, often with contemplative strolls through Paris and languid cigarette smoking.
So it seems a little wrong to meet her — exuding bookish coolness in a baggy green jumper and chestnut laces — in a conference room on the ninth floor of a London office building. But it's the 42-year-old actress's base of operations on a visit to the UK to launch her eighth feature film as writer-director, which will premiere next weekend. In One Fine Morning, Léa Seydoux plays Sandra, a translator and single mother who begins an affair with an already romantically attached man while watching her elderly father succumb to the neurodegenerative effects of Benson's syndrome (a type of Alzheimer's disease). Like much of her work, she is rooted in her own life: she began writing the screenplay shortly after she, her daughter, and her then-new partner, filmmaker Laurent Perrault, had a particularly difficult visit with her retired father, Olya. a philosopher in his Montmartre nursing home, where Benson gnawed at his once razor-sharp mind. Then, to clear their heads, the three climbed the 270 steps to the square outside the Sacré Coeur.
“Usually I would never go there,” she explains dryly, “because only tourists do that. But my daughter never saw Paris from there, so we went. Upstairs, she felt “this terrible guilt that I fell in love and felt hope for the future at a time when my father was, yes, still alive, but in many ways already gone. So writing the film became a way to unravel those feelings and then figure out how together they can bring Lea's character to the same point.» Climbing that day was the final scene of her film.
Said film is one of her best: dazzlingly intelligent, emotionally clear, and in Sandra's romance with Melville Poupo's Clement, who is not unlike Hansen-Loewe's own partner, Perrault, hearty hot. She thought of Seydou for Sandra precisely because the role clashed with the actress' post-James Bond glamorous image (she played Daniel Craig's love interest Madeleine Swann in Ghost and No Time to Die).
Melville Poupot, Camille Leban Martins and Léa Seydoux in One Fine Morning
“For Lea, playing an ordinary woman was exotic,” she says. «But even in the Bond films, I saw in her a rawness and a certain sadness that attracted me as much as the magnetism of her beauty.» She recalls being particularly impressed when Seydou and Pupo filmed their characters' first kiss — as well as the first time both actors kissed — and Seydou somehow managed to blush afterwards.
«Lea was in so many love scenes it was worthless!» Hansen-Löwe shines. «But she still felt that intimacy shyness, and to me, that's a perfect example of her talent.» On the screen, this is an extraordinary moment: the first two touch their lips, as if dipping their toes into the stream, and the sharpness of pleasure takes both by surprise. Their ensuing relationship is awe-inspiring, comforting and compelling in equal measure: something too beautiful, too intense and just too fun to brush it off.
This connection was also drawn from Hansen-Löwe's own life. For 15 years she was romantically attached to director Olivier Assayas (who, 26 years her senior, inspired the senior professor in Goodbye First Love), but in 2017 they broke up and her relationship with Perrault blossomed at the same time as the sunset of her father. (She and Perrault had a son in 2020, shortly before the filming of One Fine Morning began.) However, she corrected one detail: in the film, Clement is already married. Isn't it?
«He is not married!» she clicks, putting me straight. “Honestly, this is a very British assumption that you made. But he has a permanent partner and a child, yes.»
She gave Clement a partner because «it made Sandra's story so much more interesting than if he was single,» she says. Although, perhaps unexpectedly — this is France, remember — she raised her eyebrows when she collected the budget. In fact, the State Center for National Film rejected her application for funding on the grounds that Sandra and Clément's behavior—and in particular her willingness to put up with his existing predicaments—made them both, and especially her, look weak.
«They told me, 'We live in a time where we don't want to see such weak women,' which really shocked me,» she says. “I mean, yes, you can say that what they are doing is morally dubious. But aren't we allowed to admit our weaknesses anymore? Aren't we allowed to enjoy them anymore?» She rolls her eyes. “But now we are in a very moral moment where these things are seen as crimes and not accepted as vital parts of the human experience.”
In Seydou and Pupo, she had two more than willing accomplices. Hansen-Löw has previously said that some male actors get annoyed by being filmed by women, “because we see weaknesses and fragility in them that men don't. But Melville had no problem with that.”
This made it a relaxing contrast to her previous protagonist Tim Roth, who proved to be a prickly collaborator while filming Bergman's Island, her 2021 English-language debut. Roth, a three-time veteran of Quentin Tarantino, joined the cast relatively late — his role as a famous but slightly selfish and grumpy director named Tony had to be recast twice due to scheduling issues — and he and Hansen-Loewe fought on numerous occasions. how the character should be played.
For example, in the beach scene, Roth refused to swim with his co-star Vicki Crips, complaining that the water was too cold. (The film is set on the Swedish island of Foro in the Baltic Sea, where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked for over 40 years.)
Wiki Crips and Tim Roth in Bergman's Island
“Initially, in my script, we had to see a lot more of his body,” she explains. «But he's physically shy, and I think somehow the fact that I filmed his character with no weapons or no violence at all made him feel naked.»
But the results were worth it. “The more he tried to make his character less vulnerable, the more it revealed his own fragility, which was helpful for the film. There are things about Tim's game that I find touching, even though he doesn't know it.»
This almost accidental revelation of the deepest psychological currents of her characters has earned Hansen-Loewe a comparison with her New Wave ancestors, especially the great Eric Rohmer, whose rich, imperfect protagonists, naturalistic style and philosophical bent are also key elements of Hansen-Loewe's own work. (Both Pupo and Pascal Greggory, who plays Sandra's sick father, are Rohmer veterans.)
She says she never tries to “imitate or remake what Rohmer did, although I admire him a lot. The fact is that we are sensitive to the same issues, and his lightness and clarity are values that I also believe in.” She shudders at the thought of young French directors «rejecting the New Wave» — I couldn't do that because it's my culture, my world. Of course, there is no one right way to make movies,” she adds caustically, “although if you choose to be influenced by American films instead, you may find yourself burdened with more conventions than you have avoided.”
'We artists need to show respect, but we also need to be free': director Mia Hansen-Löwe Photo : Ray Schroer.
One recent Hollywood innovation that makes Hansen-Loewe think is the post-MeToo introduction of the intimacy coordinator: on-set supervisors who make sure that love scenes unfold as a series of collectively choreographed moves.
“If I live to see a point in film history where I’m legally required to have some kind of police on set telling me what I’m allowed to do, I’d rather stop filming sex scenes altogether,” she despairs. /p>
“I know it's not politically correct to say, and I know it's a difficult question: I understand why some actors would like to have some kind of witness to make them feel more secure. But I also know others who have told me privately that they hate the very thought of it.”
Her own preferred method is the one she uses in staging most other scenes: sometimes personally guiding the actors by movements. with the assistance of her screenwriter, with whom she usually plans the entire film in advance.
«I don't want them to think that I'm watching from behind some kind of glass screen, but I'm participating physically, too» she explains. “Yes, as artists, we have to show respect. But we must also be free.”
One Fine Morning in theaters Friday
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