This is not an easy movie. It tackles big stuff– the biggest, really, like the precarious balance between present and future, family and work, business and art, mortality and immortality. But it breathes, nonetheless.
It’s a tale of cinema, a story about the agonies of trying to work outside the cinematic mainstream (even in France!). Yet what makes the movie so affecting is that it’s also a love story about a family.
Hansen-Løve’s greatest achievement here may be in the film’s sui generis structure: She sets up the terms as she goes with quiet authority, and even those that don’t wholly convince (the suicide scene itself; a subplot involving a secret family) don’t disrupt the film’s intricate and involving progression.
Hansen-Løve has movingly composed a bridge between the unspeakable responsibility of parenthood and the numinous suffering required to make films: a ferocious, merciless bridge, but one made of fondness none the less.
One of the best-reviewed films of Cannes 2009 is this sensitive, small-scale study of a family shattered by an entirely unexpected tragedy. Indeed, part of the point of the picture is that the audience should be almost as blindsided by said unexpected tragedy – which comes around the halfway point – as the surviving characters.
As the Balsan surrogate, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing shifts seamlessly from a cine-champion drowning in debt to a beloved père of three daughters—whose ease and grace onscreen confirms Hansen-Løve’s gifts for directing children and adolescents.
Hansen-Løve’s technique was to get the kids playing, hide behind the furniture so they wouldn’t think about her, wait a few minutes, start rolling, and to call the main actors in for the scene. The result’s probably about the best film about children and childhood there could be.