Magdalena Tsanis
Madrid (EFE).- French director Mia Hansen-Love (Paris, 1981) saw her father die at the height of the covid pandemic and reflects on it and on how the desire to live is accentuated by the loss of latest film, “A beautiful morning”, starring Léa Seydoux and which hits theaters this Friday.
“We must rethink the way we care for the elderly and the sick,” the director of films such as “Edén” (2014) or “El porvenir” (2016), a film with Isabelle Huppert that addressed the death of the mother and with which “A beautiful morning” forms a “diptych”.
Seydoux, who has worked with directors such as Tarantino, Woody Allen and Ridley Scott and has been a ‘Bond girl’, puts herself here in the shoes of Sandra, a mother who divides her time between raising her daughter alone and visiting his father (Pascal Greggory), who suffers from a neurodegenerative disease.
One day he meets Clément (Melvil Poupaud), an old friend, on the street and they begin a passionate relationship, despite the fact that he is engaged to another woman with whom he has a son.
“You can feel immense sorrow and at the same time something that resists and that wants to be free and happy, that wants to be saved, not be swallowed up by the disease, it is something understandable but also cruel, it affected me a lot when I went through that situation” , explains the director, who explores this duality through fiction.
A consolidated voice of auteur cinema
Hansen-Love began working as a critic for the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, where she met the director Olivier Assayas, her later romantic partner and with whom she made her acting debut in “End of August, beginning of September” (1998) and repeated in “Les destinées sentimental” (2000).
In 2004 he directed his first short and three years later he released his first feature film, “Everything is forgiven” (2007). With the follow-up, “The Father of My Children” (2009), she won the Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
With eight films already behind him, he is today a consolidated voice of French auteur cinema that moves in the field of autofiction.
“When I started it was more difficult, it was considered something minor, but today cinema with an autobiographical dimension is better accepted and I think it has to do with the fact that films made by women are better received, more attention is paid to these issues,” he reasons. .
He also believes that the rise of platforms and productions, especially series, of “collective and industrial” authorship, may end up having the effect of auteur cinema and “more personal voices” being valued more.
The impact of covid
On the other hand, the film shows the loneliness of urban life. “I have left Paris”, says the director, “I am not far away, in Montreuil but I have more space, a garden, it was something unthinkable years ago for me, because I was born in Paris and I deeply love that city but at the same time a saturation point.
He acknowledges that, as happened to many people, the confinement due to the covid influenced his decision. “I have experienced the worst of the pandemic, my father died of covid when he had no right to visit or bury them, it was something inhumane, suddenly the life he loved became something very hard, unbreathable.”
Hansen-Love stresses the need to “rethink” care for the elderly and the residential model. Based on her own experience, in the film she shows the saturation of public residences and the difficulty of finding an affordable option with good care among private ones.
“I’m sure many people have faced a situation like this, it’s embarrassing,” she says. “Adequate care has a real impact on the state of patients, there are patients who are allowed to die because they are in a deadly, sad environment and the State has a responsibility there.”