It’s really nice to see how someone doesn’t fit into any drawer. Mia Hansen-Løve is a delicate, blonde woman who is still young and looks even younger, still a bit like in her first major role in the 1998 film “Late August, Beginning of September”. But you shouldn’t draw any conclusions from that . The type in French cinema that she would probably have embodied on screen had she remained an actress would not have suited her. Instead, she started writing and became a film critic for the Cahiers du Cinéma. And then, like many of her predecessors, Truffaut or Éric Rohmer, she made films herself that are full of philosophy and references to the cinema that she loves, fearless of the greatest possible footsteps. Very soon she became one of the most important voices in French cinema.
Mia Hansen-Løve, who owes her Scandinavian-sounding surname to a Danish grandfather, is the daughter of a philosophy teacher. She speaks slowly and in set words and gives long answers. She analyzes everything, a classic French intellectual. “Bergman Island” is the name of the new film with which she came to the Viennale Festival in Vienna, the premiere was in Cannes in the summer. It’s autumn now, the leaves in the park near the festival offices are turning yellow, and everything looks a little calm and subdued – that suits her very well. She has brought her daughter to the festival, who is learning vocabulary during an interview in a corner of the room while she ponders her relationship to Ingmar Bergman’s films.
At the beginning of “Bergman Island” a couple comes to the island of Fårö in the Baltic Sea, where Bergman lived and partly also shot. Chris, played by Vicky Krieps, is a young director, Tony (Tim Roth) her partner, a well-known and much older filmmaker. They live in one of the former homes of the Swedish cinema master, all of which have remained unchanged thanks to the Bergman Foundation – this is the bed from “Scenes from a Marriage”, says Chris on arrival, not a good omen.
Both have work grants from the Foundation, both write scripts in very different, irreconcilable ways. Writing is easy for him, not for her. With everything else, however, he always seems to be dependent on her presence, her support. Chris, on the other hand, is on her own at work and in what she writes down. At some point you see it as a film in a film: a woman meets her former boyfriend in Fårö and is ready to give up everything in order to be with him again.
A filmmaker couple with a big age difference, of course it’s also about Hansen-Løve herself and her relationship with Olivier Assayas, the director who discovered her as an actress for “late August, early September”. Years later she met him again, then he became her partner and father of her daughter – and some of her films seemed to communicate with one another. She made “Eden” about growing up in the rave era of the nineties, he made “Die Wilde Zeit” about his youth in the shadows of 1968. Her “Everything was coming”, for which she won the directing award at the 2016 Berlinale, and his The film “Between the Lines”, shot shortly afterwards, tells both of how intellectual publishing is changing in France. His film was rather cheerful, hers with sadness. They have been separated for a long time now, and both have kept it very private.
“I’ve never been this close to believing in ghosts”
Mia Hansen-Løve’s stories are personal, they are not really autobiographical. One could say: you and your life shine through in your work. It is almost always about people in crisis – no loud outbursts, rather quiet, harrowing inventories. Hansen-Løve actually had several scholarship stays at Fårö and wrote there. “In two different of Bergman’s houses. In the film you only see two, but there are five or six. As far as I know, it was the first time anyone was on the island to write and actually wrote about Bergman.”
And also about yourself: In “Bergman Island” you see a relationship that is not over yet, but shows signs of dissolution. The film in the film merges with the framework story until one can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is not. Either the ex-boyfriend really exists and he appears on Fårö, or he is a character from a script who haunts the life of its inventor.
A filmmaker couple on work vacation at Ingmar Bergman’s houses: Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth in “Bergman Island”.
(Photo: imago images)
“I’ve never been so close to believing in ghosts as I was on this island,” says Mia Hansen-Løve. “I sensed Bergman’s presence and that of his films by the end of the shoot, but not in a frightening way.” On the contrary – this presence would have invited her to work on her film. “I don’t have a favorite Bergman movie, I have ten favorite Bergman movies,” she says. “Sarabande” is one of them, for example, and “Scenes of a Marriage”.
She had to re-cast “Bergman Island” when filming postponed and the original actors were no longer available. John Turturro and Greta Gerwig were supposed to play the leading roles, then Tim Roth and Vicky Krieps took over, “and of course that changed the film completely. On the other hand, I had carried this story around with me for a long time and the whole project had matured”. It is like that, she then explains: “The American Greta Gerwig shifted this story more into fiction. Vicky Krieps is European, closer to my own European feelings, closer to my own melancholy.” She says nothing about the cast of Tony – but even physically Tim Roth is much closer to filmmaker Assayas than John Turturro.
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She finds it difficult to write, like Chris in the film: “Although it’s a fight every time, it also makes me proud.” Everything has to go through your writing process in search of clarity. The rest is filmmaking, fitting dialogues into a scene, working with actors, finding pictures. Like the one when Isabelle Huppert’s character in “Alles Waskom” stands in front of the bookshelf, there are gaps everywhere, her husband took these books with him when he moved in with his young lover – and the respected professor stands in front of the riddled fragment of her existence.
“Great artists are often egoists, that’s the way it is.”
Somewhere it said that Mia Hansen-Løve was working on a sequel to “Alles was geht”, but that is hard to imagine. The whole film is pervaded by a deep melancholy, it is about how this woman in the center with all her energy and zest for life will not go anywhere anymore because she is pushed into the role of a grandmother left behind. “The continuation is not entirely true either,” says Hansen-Løve. “It’s more of a diptych, a project that will stand by and have something to do with it. All the films speak to each other, and these two will enter into a dialogue in a special way.”
This year Eva Sangiorgi, the director of the Viennale, invited many of those filmmakers who made 2021 a film year for women. Andrea Arnold, for example, who was in Cannes with “Cow” like Hansen-Løve, and Audrey Diwan, whose abortion drama “L ‘évènement” won the Venice Film Festival. Mia Hansen-Løve, who has only just turned forty, made her first film in 2007, the second, “The Father of My Children”, she showed in Cannes in 2009, has seen other times. “Festival bosses used to tell me that my films were too ‘girlie’. They couldn’t get away with that today. I think that women are no longer accused of making films with a feminine sensibility – but don’t get me wrong, women have no monopoly on them. ” Did she ask what “girlie” actually meant? “No. I didn’t want to be interested in that. I didn’t want to be intimidated.”
Ingmar Bergman was a lousy father, says the director and young mother Chris at the beginning of “Bergman Island”. Is Hansen-Løve’s own relationship with Bergman ambivalent? “Great artists are often egoists, that’s just the way it is. I was interested in showing how a woman who wants to make her own films and still raises her children sees that: Can you be an artist with a work and yet avoid this egoism “I don’t have an answer to that, but I think most creative women ask themselves these questions and they occupy me deeply. I want to show that. Are there any films made by men with this question? I don’t know. This is not an issue, that she’s interested. But I don’t want to judge it morally – I didn’t know Bergman. However he lived his life, it doesn’t prevent me from loving his films. And you can still want to do it differently yourself. ” How seriously she means it becomes clear when the interview ends shortly afterwards. Mia Hansen-Løve is now needed elsewhere. For vocabulary queries in the corner of the room.