Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  ‘There are films I want to make. There are films I have to make. This is a film I had to make.’ This is how writer-director Mia Hansen-L ø ve introduced her latest Paris-set family drama, Un Beau Matin ( One Fine Morning ), a film whose optimistic title suggests its tone if not its subject. The logline might be, ‘as she tries to arrange long-term care provision for her ailing, near-blind father, single mother Sandra commences an affair with a married man’. It is the affair, with all its difficulties, that gives cause for optimism, without detracting from the heartbreak of seeing one’s parent being transferred to an anonymising environment, one that reduces them to their most basic bodily impulses, to sleep, eat, wander, perhaps to sing, untethered from the life before. I boarded the Hansen- Løve train after watching her long-delayed, very enjoyable English language relationship drama, Bergman Island . She is an intimate director, dealing with emotional situations and milieux o...

  I confess I arrived late to an appreciation of French director Mia Hansen-L ø ve. Up until Bergman Island , her first predominantly English language film, I had not attuned myself to her low-key style of storytelling evident in such films as All is Forgiven , Eden and Things to Come . However, before watching Bergman Island , I hadn’t seen a film for ten days. It took the cleansing of my cinematic palate to surrender myself to a film that even by the standards of ‘arthouse’ cinema is slow and low stakes – at least to begin with. I knew I was going to have a good time when a satellite navigation system announced to its passengers, the filmmaking couple of Tony (Tim Roth) and Chris (Vicky Krieps), ‘you will reach your destination in one hour and forty-eight minutes’, which, broadly speaking is the running time of the film. The title sequence of Bergman Island consists of words typed on a white screen in a font similar to ‘Engravers MT’, complete with spelling corrections, wi...