The elliptical cinema of Mia Hansen-Løve

by Cláudio Alves

Cinema is many things. An audiovisual art form, a dream, memories crystalized, ghosts of light. It's also a language, an idiom with rules and grammar of its own. Some cineastes film straightforward prose. Others prefer a lyrical approach and write poems with their cameras. There are those who make manifestos, compose diaries, some even do journalistic documentations. Whatever their uses of the language of cinema, the punctuation is usually the same, with norms judiciously followed to keep the clarity of intention, of information and tone. Still, sometimes the most interesting artist is the one that bends those rules to their will, reshaping, transforming, making them into something personal.

Mia Hansen-Løve is such a filmmaker. Instead of employing commas and periods, writing and cutting traditionally, she prefers to film in ellipsis. Constant, evocative, oft-mysterious and emotionally poignant, ellipsis…

Click to read more ...

Three Games for the News: Denzel and the Mias

by Murtada

News is coming at us so fast from the 70th Cannes, currently unspooling, that we can hardly keep up. Let’s then take a moment then to ruminate on a film that might screen at the 72nd edition in May of 2019...

Click to read more ...

NYFF: "Things To Come" with Isabelle Huppert

Jason reporting from the NYFF on the new film from director Mia Hansen-Løve, currently scheduled to open in limited release on December 2nd

At about the midpoint of Things to Come Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) says to a friend that she's "found freedom" but we know better. We've been watching freedom thrust upon her in disorienting spasms, as her husband's left her and her publishing house has tossed her old-fashioned intellectualism aside (one of them hurls out the word "classy" like it's going to burn her hands). And in truth Nathalie doesn't quite know what to make of it, this "found" freedom of hers. "Extraordinary," is what she calls it, and that approaches the thing, but not quite the way she's selling it at that moment...

Click to read more ...

Berlin: Fire at Sea Wins the Golden Bear

 Amir Soltani is covering the Berlin International Film Festival.

The Berlinale officially closes today. Although we’re not yet finished with our coverage – a couple of interviews still to come – it’s the perfect time to look back and discuss the festival’s awards. In my review of Gianfranco Rosi’s exquisite new film, Fire at Sea, I noted that it would be a shock for the film to leave the Berlinale empty-handed. Lo and behold, the festival’s jury, headed by Meryl Streep, agreed with the sentiment, and rightly awarded the competition’s best film with the Golden Bear.

The festival’s unofficial theme – repeated across press releases and around the festival hub – was refugees and immigrants. Much as Rosi’s impressive constructed, morally compelling and profoundly moving film might have benefited from that, however, it was hard to ignore the fact that its reception by critics and audiences simply towered above any other film playing in any program in Berlin. The theory among critics was that if another film were to win, it would be Mia Hansen-Løve’s L’Avenir would be it. With critics near-unanimously calling it the director’s best work yet, and with four women on a jury of seven, the Isabel Huppert vehicle was likely to find favour, and indeed it nabbed the best director prize. [More...]

Click to read more ...

Berlin: The Latest from Mia Hansen-Løve and André Téchiné

 Amir Soltani is covering the Berlin International Film Festival, TFE's first time at Berlinale! Here are the two French films from the festival’s Competition section (the group of film's Meryl Streep & jury are seeing).

L’AVENIR (Mia Hansen-Løve)
Mia Hansen-Løve has established herself as one of world cinema’s most exciting young filmmakers in the past few years. Her latest, L’Avenir (Things to Come) came to Berlinale as one of the festival’s most anticipated films. Starring Isabelle Huppert as Nathalie, a middle-aged philosophy teacher on the verge of significant changes in her personal and professional life, L’Avenir is an intimate, life-affirming character study with a superb star turn from Huppert...

Click to read more ...