In the House of Cinema: A Conversation with Mia Hansen-Løve
Mia Hansen-Løve makes delicate, graceful films about overpowering emotions. After beginning her career in front of the camera, acting in Olivier Assayas’s Late August, Early September (1998) and Les destinées (2000) as a teenager, she transitioned to directing at the age of twenty-six with All Is Forgiven (2007), the first in a series of quietly devastating family dramas that established her as one of French cinema’s most sensitive young storytellers. In all of her work, she captures people in turbulent moments in their lives, and her often autobiographical character studies bring subtlety and insight to the exploration of grief, self-discovery, and youth’s fleeting pleasures.
This month on the Criterion Channel, we’re celebrating Hansen-Løve’s work with a series of three of her features: Father of My Children (2010), the story of a producer in crisis; Goodbye First Love (2011), a tale of romantic heartbreak; and Things to Come (2016), a chronicle of one woman’s post-marital awakening. In our wide-ranging conversation, she talked about the life-affirming pleasure she gets on set and how she hopes to build a filmography in which all the parts speak to each other.