Mia Hansen

In the movies of Mia Hansen-Løve (Paris, 1981) there are always characters who go to the movies and who talk about movies. The father of my children (2009) is even starring a producer, but Bergmann’s Island, which arrives on the big screen this Friday, July 1, is already reaching the paroxysm of the metacinematographic. His first project in English is starring Vicky Krieps Y Tim Roth in the roles of a couple of filmmakers who settles one summer in Fårö, home and grave of the director of films like screams and whispers, Fanny and Alexander Y the seventh seal.

Perhaps this impressionist director, a lover of detail and downtime, feels a deep admiration for the ability of the Swedish totem to portray the anxieties of life as a couplebut in the interview we had with her in the context of the Valencia Cinema Jove international film festival, she confided in us that what drove her penultimate film was a powerful childish imaginary.

Hansen-Løve grew up in a modest apartment in a block of nondescript buildings. She clarifies that she did not have a sad childhood, just monotonous. To escape, she fantasized about Scandinavia, the land of her paternal grandfather: “Going to Fårö was like fulfilling a childhood dream. I think that in my attraction to Bergman’s universe there is a desire to find a kind of paradise lost.

Ask. His films are always based on some emotion. which is present in The Bergmann’s Island?

Response. The one I tried to contain in the eyes of Vicky Krieps’s character in the last shot of the film. After holding her daughter in her arms, she casts a glance at her husband where there are contradictory feelings, which are not expressed out loud: a form of complicity, joy and at the same time distance from her, perhaps an abyss. It is an acceptance that certain things cannot be shared. In fact, it is this vision of the couple, This mixture of confusion, love and lonelinesswhich the film seeks to explore.

Rohmer’s word

P. His cinema is woven of silences. Do you include them in the script, do you keep them in mind when you write?

R. Yes, one of the reasons I became a director instead of a writer is because cinema allows me to say many things without necessarily resorting to words. That does not mean that what is said does not matter. My actors, in fact, improvise very little. The reason is that I like the language, so I want to be able to choose the words. However, they are always extracted from silence. That is what differentiates me from Rohmer’s cinema. Many times I am compared to him, and I really admire him, but although there is mystery in his films, the action springs from speech, while in my films it is from the balance between silence and language. My actors say things that are sometimes important, sometimes insignificant, but in any case they always highlight a silence.

P. In a meeting with the Norwegian director Joachim Trier at the Lincoln Center, she declared that she felt alone, with the conviction that she did not belong to any current cinematographic movement. She has quoted Rohmer and this film is a tribute to Bergman. Do you think that her cinema is ascribed then to currents of the past?

R. (laughs) I have a problem claiming to be part of a movie family, because it seems presumptuous to me. But also I find it very difficult to declare myself the heiress of Ingmar Bergman, Rohmer, Truffaut or Bresson, because I don’t know if they would have accepted me as such. These are, in any case, the filmmakers that nurture me, the family that I have chosen. That does not mean, however, that there are not filmmakers of my generation whom I admire.

P. Which ones do you feel closest to then?

R. What happens is that today there is no current like the Nouvelle Vague, a community articulated around a theory of cinema. There are critics who include me in a new wave of young female directors, but gender does not seem to me an aesthetic criterion. The Nouvelle Vague invented modernity in France. I hope that many of us have developed our own language, but I don’t think we can define ourselves as a current, because we haven’t created joint forms.

P. Do you consider yourself mythomaniac?

R. I was when I started working on this project. During the writing of the script, the actor from Eden (2014), Felix De Givry. We were like two children. We were excited. I got all the souvenirs that I caught, a Bergman ticket, a Bergman mug… (Laughter) This fetishism has only hit me with it. I can’t explain why. My admiration for Bergman is immense, but no greater than that I feel for Bresson, Truffaut or Rohmer. Perhaps it has to do with the search for my Scandinavian origins. I have a kind of Nordic heritage that I’ve always identified with, but feels like a place. I grew up in France, I don’t have family in Denmark and I don’t speak Danish. so there is a mixture of familiarity in a literal sense and distance, where I identify Fårö as my lost origins.

P. Your movie Future (2016) begins with a visit to the tomb of Chateaubriand and Bergmann’s Island collects the pilgrimage of moviegoers to the refuge and setting of many of the Swedish director’s masterpieces. What do you think of cemetery tourism?

R. The approach in both films is different. In Bergmann’s Island his grave is anecdotal, one place among many in Fårö where the presence of the director is. It is a very beautiful place. Aesthetically, I was interested in filming it. But ultimately, I was interested because raises the question of belief in God in Bergman, an aspect that interests me as a filmmaker. In FutureInstead, Chateaubriand embodies the love of the protagonist and her husband through thought, the importance they give in their lives to a spirituality that is not defined by belief in God.

P. Considers Bergmann’s Island a ghost movie? I say this both because of Bergman’s spectral presence and because of the story starring Mia Wasikowska, about a woman who can’t escape the memory of her first love.

R. Absolutely. The idea of ​​expressing the dialogue we have with people who are not there is more or less in all my films, but as an unconscious and secret story. Although I feel a great interest in capturing spirituality, my cinema is realistic, so the ghosts cannot be literal, but remain inside the characters. This is the first and only time I have found a way to film missing beings. The childhood magic of the island gave me a key to the imagination that gave access to a ghost story.

P. That movie within the movie looks like an epilogue to his rookie movie. a love of youth (2011), about a woman who cannot turn the page after the breakup of her first love.

R. Exactly. For a long time I wanted to return to those characters of a wedding that takes place over three days, but I didn’t want to dedicate a movie to them, because it felt like going back. Suddenly it felt very natural for me to integrate the story into Bergmann’s Island like the script Krieps is writing.

P. That movie was very autobiographical, so is this one in a way?

R. Well, if I’m a director it’s because cinema helps me live. I’ve always had this idea that cinema is part of my life and therefore nourishes my creations. a love of youth defined how I had transformed the grief and pain of a first love into the strength to become a filmmaker. In Bergmann’s Island I also try to connect creation and lack of love. It is the adult version. I wanted to add another layer to the reflection on who we are, how we write and what we have become. I wanted to trace the pathways by which a self-destructive force ultimately becomes an engine of creation.

Follow the topics that interest you