News

Mia Hansen-Løve on Maya and Bergman Island: "You could eventually say that hauntedness is the one thing maybe the two films have in common." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In Margarethe von Trotta's Searching For Ingmar Bergman, Mia Hansen-Løve speaks about how Ingmar Bergman's house on Fårö is haunted. Mia's Maya tells the story of journalist Gabriel (Roman Kolinka) who was a hostage in Syria, together with his associate Frédéric (Alex Descas). Returning to France, he cannot cope. Gabriel tells the psychologist (François Loriquet): "The worst was feeling guilty." But he doesn't want therapy because he himself "works with words." It is "the kidnappers who need analysis." His former girlfriend Naomi (Judith Chemla) serenades him with Schubert "Liebchen, komm zu mir!" but not even the moonlight can make him reconnect.

Gabriel (Roman Kolinka) with Maya (Aarshi Banerjee)

Gabriel wants to go to India, to the overgrown house in Goa where he spent his childhood.

Mia Hansen-Løve’s best films envelop the viewer so persuasively in their currents of feeling that it can take you a moment or two to notice how coolly and methodically constructed they are: the revealing agility of her camera placement, the sharp economy of her editing, the often rich irony of her musical selections, all subtly contributing to character portraits of granular depth. In “Maya,” her sixth and most internationally-minded feature, those virtues hit you straight away, only to reveal more grace and precision in the framing than in the rather hazily conceived characters themselves. A study of a European man’s healing Indian odyssey that gives in all too frequently to hoary colonial romanticism, this is the first stumble in Hansen-Løve’s hitherto impressive filmography — the kind of directorial misstep that at least makes it clear how deft her footwork usually is.

Coming off Hansen-Løve’s best and most...

An overstretched film producer shoots himself in the head when the bank refuses to extend him the credit he needs for his latest movie, leaving his widow to finish the project. A mediocre French DJ fritters away the best 20 years of his life before coming to grips with the fact that he’ll never be Daft Punk. A middle-aged professor doesn’t know what to do with herself after her husband leaves her for a younger woman; she’s not unhappy so much as burdened by the unbearable lightness of freedom.

It would be an understatement to say that change does not come naturally to the characters of Mia Hansen-Løve, a 38-year-old auteur whose first six films have established her as one of modern cinema’s most compelling voices — these are people who define themselves by their partners and vocations, and would rather kamikaze their entire lives than dare to adjust course.

"What are you doing in Goa?" Les Films du Losange has revealed the first official trailer for the indie drama Maya, the latest film made by acclaimed French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve. This film is mostly in English, as it's about a French war journalist who makes it home after being held captive in Syria. He travels to Goa, India where he meets an intelligent young woman and spends time trying to recover. Roman Kolinka stars as the French man, and Aarshi Banerjee stars as Maya, with a small cast including Suzan Anbeh, Judith Chemla, Anjali Khurana, and Pathy Aiyar. I saw this at the Toronto Film Festival where it premiered (read my full review), and it's a bit low key, but still contains all the uplifting, honest emotions that make Mia Hansen-Løve's films so wonderful. See below. Here's the first official French trailer for Mia Hansen-Løve's Maya, direct from YouTube...

Following up Goodbye First Love, Things to Come, Eden, and more of the best films of the century thus far, Mia Hansen-Løve returned this year. Premiering on the fall festival circuit was her latest film, Maya, and while it’s still awaiting U.S. distribution, those in France are lucky enough to see it upon its release in December. Ahead of the theatrical release, the first trailer has arrived for the film that follows a French war reporter who was taken to hostage in Syria and then heads to India after months in captivity.

Josh Lewis said in his Tiff review, “Compounded by lush photography and carefully calibrated performances, Maya intimately renders the crushing and rehabilitative power of memory, taking hazy, elusive feelings and bringing them into the realm of the tangible.” See the trailer below for the film starring Roman Kolinka, Aarshi Banerjee, Alex Descas, Pathy Aiyar, Suzan Anbeh,...

In a creative spurt that will have given us give her seminal film Things to Come (review) in 2016, the Tiff world preemed Maya (2018) and Bergman Island (2019) in a breakneck pace of a film per 18 months, Mia Hansen-Løve came to Toronto with Roman Kolinka (who has become a three film in a row muse) and first time actress Aarshi Banerjee. This ode to Goa feels like a distant cousin of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger in terms of how it’s protagonist journalist embraces a change in identity while haphazardly being aided or guided by a young women.…...

Mia Hansen-Løve has carved a unique career for herself as a filmmaker of tacit sensitivity and stories on the margins of more familiar ones. Eden traversed the well-worn story of a rise-and-fall musician by having him never truly rise in the first place; instead exploring the tragedy of a young DJ talented enough to make it a career but not enough to become as big a success as he needs to before his trend of music is over. Hansen-Løve’s ephemeral sense of structure makes it feel like a decade floats by while he’s stuck in a slow-motion spiral of pain and sacrifices so that his life can remain static. Things to Come pulled a similar trick taking the existential mid-life crisis that is forced upon its central character—due to an unexpected divorce, and her obsolescence at home and work—and mining it for the subtle freedoms and...

The Notebook is covering Tiff with an on-going correspondence between critics Kelley Dong and Daniel Kasman.aKashaDear Kelley,The festival definitely is changing now: the industry-oriented market side of the event has finished, so many sales agents and distributors and other such folk have decamped, even as premieres keep being revealed, and audiences are delighted (or exasperated). There's still plenty on my schedule and plenty more I want to share with you.Are there filmmakers for you, Kelley, whose sensibility you embrace but whose films you sometimes struggle to like? That, for me, is Mia Hansen-Løve, who has made six features to date, two of which I think knock it out of the park—The Father of My Children and Things to Come. But her other recent work, including Goodbye, First Love, Eden, and now Maya, may resonate with a sensibility of intelligent compassion and emotional insight, yet tell stories I find torpid.

The people in Mia Hansen-Løve’s movies always struggle with change — specifically, with those bittersweet moments between major life events, which percolate with the sadness of uncertainty and the romance of something new. In “Father of My Children,” a family is dissolved by a sudden death that forces them to reconstitute who they are. In “Eden,” an aspiring French DJ fritters away the best 20 years of his life before coming to grips with the fact that he’ll never be Daft Punk. And in the extraordinary “Things to Come,” a middle-aged professor is burdened with the full weight of a newfound freedom after her husband leaves her for a younger woman.

Change, it seems, is the only constant in Hansen-Løve’s remarkable and constantly surprising body of work, which has already confirmed the 37-year-old filmmaker as one of modern cinema’s most brilliant new voices. But change, in her movies,...

As has become commonplace for the annual event, the Cannes Film Festival’s competition slate continues to be dominated by male directors. Announced yesterday, the 2018 competition lineup includes the highest number of films from female filmmakers since 2011, and the festival will play home to new works from Nadine Labaki, Eva Husson, and Alice Rohrwacher. At the festival’s announcement press conference, artistic director Thierry Frémaux hinted that another work from a woman could be added to the lineup in the coming days.

In years past, Frémaux has blamed the lack of female directors on the Cannes slate on the discrepancy between how many male and female directors are working today, and yet Cannes has often programmed and championed a number of the film world’s best female filmmakers. The lack of many of them from this year’s lineup is jarring — though, to be fair, this year’s lineup is...