Windows, Time and the Things to Come in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Films

In One Fine Morning, Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest feature, new and old love are paired together in a stunning, strange pattern that throws into question the inflexibility of loyalty and love. Sandra (Léa Seydoux) is left caring for her ailing father (Pascal Greggory) who, despite his academic ability and intellectual prowess, is incapable of living alone in his old age. At the same time, she falls for an old flame, now married and with his own family. It is a stirring, romantic drama, prickly and deceptively hard to watch. Hansen-Løve’s jagged, matter-of-fact understanding of commitment is one that can cut the viewer, tearing through people’s unthinking desire for undying, lifelong partnership. This interrogation is born out of a heightened sensitivity to time and its exacting cost.
Hansen-Løve’s meandering focus belies a career-spanning discomfort with time. She shoots long scenes of her characters padding around the worn floorboards of their Parisian apartments, holding the camera steady as they make coffee. Peruse their bookshelves. In reality, she is buying time, aware that these moments of mundanity are really bursts of control, of attempting to maintain this moment for as long as possible. About halfway through her 2009 film The Father of My Children, Grégoire’s (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) life is imploding in a series of increasingly dramatic financial constraints. In the scope of the film, he is days away from taking his own life, shown sitting in his office, silent and slouched in his chair with an ever-present cigarette dangling from his hand. But the camera follows his daughter Clémence (Alice de Lencquesaing), who glides through the house, watering the plants that are positioned along each windowsill, throwing the sunlight into new patterns. She pleasantly chats to her sisters, giving the audience a momentary break from the onslaught of Grégoire’s chaos, a moment for us to slip away and watch, rather than feel, time.
The window is familiar framing for Hansen-Løve, who wields each pane with care and composure through her films, letting them inform the way her characters are allowed to see their lives, giving them distance from their decisions. In Goodbye, First Love, Camille (Lola Créton) and Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) retreat to his cottage in Marseilles, an attempt to casually rekindle their relationship that is eventually aborted. Throughout the trip she peers out the window, watching him, watching the garden, watching the rolling hills beyond, scared to step out and face what makes this dynamic so fraught.
If windows give her characters a framework to view their options, literal space to momentarily escape the suffocating confines of time, the brick wall that Annette (Marie-Christine Friedrich) grabs when confronted with Victor’s (Paul Blain) plea for forgiveness in All Is Forgiven serves to represent the inflexibility of time. She pauses, swallowing back tears, positioning her body to face the worn red bricks of the rehab center. “I can’t,” she admits. Their relationship is not illuminated by the white light held by tall windows. It is cold and inflexible, set in stone.
As someone interested in tracking the way time moves, Hansen-Løve almost always features children in crucial roles. She pays close attention to the way time shapes them, how they respond to its movement, the memories they grasp. This lens is most clearly applied to her first feature, All Is Forgiven which follows Pamela (Victoire and Constance Rousseau) through the aftermath of her parents’ split. The adoring, impenetrable child has grown into a quiet teenager with gaps in her memory she can’t account for. “Paris was a dark two-room apartment on the first floor,” Victor (Paul Blain) explains to Pamela over dinner. “I imagined something really big,” Pamela remarks in surprise, “Funny how memory distorts things.”