Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Mia Hansen-Løve's All Is Forgiven (2007) is showing on MUBI starting January 7, 2021 in most countries in the series First Films First.
A modest story told with fierce intelligence and freedom, All Is Forgiven (2007), written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve at the age of 25, signaled the style and strength of a new and most brilliant filmmaker. Not complying with the familiar-looking (French) family drama’s conventions, the film is an achievement in integrity, a first expression of an original filmmaking philosophy that will be refined and reappear again and again in Hansen-Løve’s next five features. In every way, Hansen-Løve’s first feature fits easily within this writer-director’s filmography. Sensitively approaching themes of death, suicide, vocation and melancholy, like Hansen-Løve’s subsequent portraits, character studies and coming-of-age films, All Is Forgiven is styled simply—without much adornment or exposition—and structured unusually, intuitively and impressionistically, sequencing scenes of daily life that closely observe characters from within the writer-director’s own family or milieu. (The film, Hansen-Løve has stated1, is loosely inspired by an uncle and cousin.)
When faced with individual misfortunes and private tragedies, Hansen-Løve’s fragile, complexly unhappy characters attempt to find their way out of self-doubt and disaster. Crises eventually culminate in coup de foudre or epiphany, and in lieu of resolution, they may experience their arc of dispossession as something transcendental or, at least, they may be offered some turning of the page. All Is Forgiven is structured similarly to Hansen-Løve’s subsequent international breakthrough Father of My Children (2009), elegantly illogical and folded evenly in two. Focus is split almost equally between its pair of protagonists, and though all of Hansen-Løve’s work deals with the passing of time in all of its indifference and irreversibility, especially unique to All Is Forgiven is a bold, brutal jump forward placed surprisingly mid-way through its runtime.
With this sudden development, the film presents two images of its two primary characters, father and daughter, before and after their 11 years of estrangement. Bygone, coagulated time is collapsed into a single title card, and on the other side of the film’s expansive excluded middle, the ruptured Victor and Pamela must reconcile and find absolution before the film’s finish. All Is Forgiven begins in medias res (or “prendre un train en marche”2) in Vienna, 1995, foregrounding its French-Austrian family of three: protagonist Victor (Paul Blain), his partner Annette (Marie-Christine Friedrich) and their daughter Pamela (Victoire Rousseau). What has taken place before the swiftly-moving film’s beginning is left to be discerned only in small details, incidentals impressed to the audience in passing and indirectly. Victor, the primary subject for the film’s first half, is a struggling writer, abusive husband and a loving (if manipulative) father, maintaining a barely-concealed drug habit that is no secret to his partner.
The disintegrating family return to Paris, where an unrelenting Victor continues to rationalize his heroin use. Speaking with his sister Martine, he outlines the role it plays in regulating his boredom and artistic anxiety, dividing his day from night. Staying close to Paul Blain (Hansen-Løve first met the non-professional actor at a 2004 retrospective dedicated to his father, filmmaker Gérard Blain, at Paris’s Le Champo cinema), Hansen-Løve presents the charismatic Victor’s routine as normal and even tolerable for a time. His decline is easier seen in hindsight. More and more untethered to the world, Victor’s dependency leads him into a relationship with another user, Gisele (Olivia Ross), who at her lowest moments is able to articulate what our protagonist does not. Suffering an emotional and mental breakdown following Gisele’s overdose, Victor is hospitalized and Annette ends their relationship, returning to Vienna with their daughter.
In spite of such potentially melodramatic material, Hansen-Løve opts against a style that is self-conscious and therefore obvious. Her writing does not differentiate between what is essential and what is expendable, and often dispenses with what would be dramatically useful for something freer and less easily defined. Dialogue, mostly simple small-talk, is thrifty, and rarely declarative or expressive of character—and when it seems to be, it usually serves only to reveal a character’s own self-delusion. All Is Forgiven is contemplative, but not slow. Rarely pausing to underline or emphasize the significant from the insignificant, the film—in scenes clipped at both beginning and end and the accelerated tempo created in its editing—reflects and remains sensitive to what its characters struggle with. In its energy and emotion, Hansen-Løve’s style concurrently contextualizes a character’s first-person feeling of stasis within an exacerbating, larger and scarier truth: that we are all running out of time. Capturing this cruel yet essential truth, intangible and ineffable though it is, Hansen-Løve has stated most “sacred.”3
Hinging on the relationship between the now-separated Victor and Pamela, All Is Forgiven can only resume 11 years later, immediately picking up post-interval from the perspective of the latter, now an adolescent, at first glance resetting somewhat into a more straightforward coming-of-age film. The movement forward in time, perhaps the most essential element to Hansen-Løve’s cinema (embedded in a more elliptical way in later films) is perhaps at its most schematic in All is Forgiven, where this decade of lost, unrepresented time sets the film’s second half into motion. Resisting flashback, a storytelling device that would be at odds with what Hansen-Løve works to convey, the film only looks forward, sympathetic to its characters' predicament and at the same time still unsentimental, warm yet shrouded with melancholy.
With both Victor and Pamela now in Paris their lives continue in parallel, intersecting again only briefly, and only twice, as the formerly self-contained family unit tries to put itself back together again. Annette has remarried—one especially striking line delivered by Pamela, “She was sick but now she’s better,” the film decides not to linger on—and Pamela (now played by Constance Rousseau) already stands on the verge of adulthood. It is an intermediary character, Victor’s sister Martine, who proves best placed to both facilitate a reunion and fill in some blanks for Pamela, summarizing father and daughter’s decade of separation, speeding through an abbreviated, imperfect version of the family history. Victor and Pamela do meet again, and though the distance between them is greater and perhaps more impossible than imagined—the father and daughter do not share the same memories—the seemingly healthier and happier Victor is able to repair his relationship with his daughter.
Though the film moves along only one axis, the progression of time is suggested to be not just linear, but in a way subjective. There are subtle suggestions that characters are pulled forward by this sweep of time at differently-felt velocities: there has been less shape to Victor’s years as there has been to Pamela’s, having had lived with the absence of her father for her most formative years, between the ages of six and seventeen. This division in All Is Forgiven might then go some way towards defining Hansen-Løve’s propulsive and polyrhythmic conception of time, dependent on relativity and the relationships between generations old and young. As one ages, they seem to cease to have an age, and so what may demarcate or even govern time for a parent, the film suggests, is the growing of their children.
By tracking these first- and third-person perspectives, and both personal and impersonal rhythms of time, we see how one must ultimately bend towards the other. Victor and Pamela’s fleeting reconciliation proves to be a vanishing point, with the film’s profound central structural shift from the former’s perspective to the latter’s and then Victor’s death marking this, the film’s climax, as both closed-ended and open-ended. His second, and final, disappearance opens and initiates a new reality for Pamela, both a loss of innocence and a time of personal revolution. All Is Forgiven concludes with Pamela at the beginning of her new grief, and regardless of the pithy resolution she is offered, she must move out of her ambivalent state between emancipation and resignation, and purposefully move forward. To do so, the film suggests one must actively accept their own passivity and powerlessness to the passing of time. This greater transcendental and abstract question of absolution and forgiveness is first posed in All Is Forgiven, though several of Hansen-Løve’s subsequent films will go on to explore this generational exchange, as is the inheritance and transfer of attention and agency from men (in crisis) to younger and more self-assured women. (The absence of fathers, a thematic connection announced in Hansen-Løve’s very first short film, Après mûre réflexion [2004], we may see reckoned with again in her upcoming seventh and eighth feature films: Bergman Island [2021] and Un beau matin [TBA].)
In coming-of-age films that follow characters of all ages, Mia Hansen-Løve has outlined again and again that freedom is not something gained but something to learn and continuously relearn. With a series of films that have, brilliantly and specifically in spite of their very dark themes, been more resplendent, sunnier and more outwardly luminous in their outlook than much of contemporary (European) filmmaking, Hansen-Løve has traced these cycles and revolutions in personhood in a literary style of (elliptical) narrative filmmaking closer to both the longform novel and the poem. (In their thematic concerns and formal and structural inventiveness, Hansen-Løve’s films might have less in common with her filmmaking contemporaries and more in common with the work of popular French writers Annie Ernaux and Patrick Modiano.)
Her more liberated characters may finally find other means to come to terms with the constant change and inherent dispossession involved in life, but Mia Hansen-Løve’s own distinctive, instinctual use of this time-based medium may itself act as its own productive push to reclaim and recollect the ruins of the past, in which memories are the fragments and found objects to be reconstituted into fiction. At the close of All is Forgiven, Pamela is left, in the last letter from her father, with the final lines of Joseph von Eichendorff’s 1815 poem “Zwielicht” (“Twilight”), a single stanza she translates from German to French and reads aloud twice. A mantra, parting gift or miniature memento, it is to its primary reader of at least some small but not insignificant comfort or consolation, for now and perhaps forever.
All Is Forgiven, a work of art that makes time material and exists permanently and physically may work similarly. Whether or not a film can do this—capture reality, honor the dead—is a question posed in Hansen-Løve’s very next feature, Father of My Children, a strikingly similar family drama on loss and legacy, commerce, cinema, and the suicide of film producer Humbert Balsan, to whom All is Forgiven is dedicated.
1. Mia Hansen-Løve (2011), ‘Cinema, Art, and Reality’ in Cinema Today ed: Elena Oumano, Rutgers University Press, p. 177
2. “There is an expression in French, which actually François Truffaut said about films, which is prendre un train en marche. It means “go on a train while the train is already moving.” And that’s how I try to write and edit my films. To always be jumping in a train that’s already moving.” Hansen-Løve (2016), Interview: Mia Hansen-Løve, Interview with Eric Hynes, Film Comment Magazine, December 2
3. The Seventh Art (2012), Mia Hansen-Løve Interview - The Seventh Art, Available at: youtube.com/watch?v=z_UWnuqa1Yk& (Accessed 04/01/2021)