Mia Hansen-Løve's cinema has often been nourished by personal stories:
The Father of My Children
was a tribute to her first producer, Humbert Balsan, the character of Isabelle Huppert in
L'Avenir
evoked her mother, a philosophy teacher ,
Bergman Island
revolved around the creative process of a filmmaker…
Un beau matin
is no exception to the rule.
The director is inspired by her experience during the last months of her father's life, who recently passed away following a neurodegenerative disease.
To read alsoMia Hansen-Løve: "On the island of Bergman, there was this confusion between cinema and life"
In an unpublished, earthy score, Léa Seydoux embodies Sandra, a single mother who, while her father is declining and must be placed, finds an old friend who becomes her lover.
Their loving parentheses will be his breaths, his lifeline in this obstacle course.
Treating with modesty the mourning of the living, the dignity of the elderly and transmission, the filmmaker also captures with infinite accuracy the paradox between the feeling of helplessness and the obligation to act in such circumstances.
Universal, heartbreaking, and yet solar.
In video,
One beautiful morning
, the trailer
Miss Figaro. – Why did you choose to go through this painful personal experience again?
Mia Hansen-Løve.
–
After
Bergman Island
, I realized that I wouldn't be able to move forward until I got to grips with this subject of my father's end of life.
There are two categories of films: those that we want to make and those that we must make.
With the latter – which includes this film or
L'Avenir –
I struggle more at the start.
At first I feel like I'm doing them reluctantly, because they force me to go back to things that are partly difficult.
But I also know they are liberating: that's what gives me the courage to go all the way, to go beyond the masochistic side.
That's to say ?
Writing these scenes between a father and his daughter opened the wound again.
These last moments with my father, I hated living them: frequenting nursing homes, seeing him sink into madness, no longer having any meaningful dialogue with him, seeing him suffer without being able to express it... It's emotional torture .
But from the moment I thought of Léa Seydoux and Pascal Greggory to embody these characters, it was no longer my story.
Fiction put things at a distance.
I could then say much more, be more shameless and free.
It was cathartic: I was no longer suffering, I was regaining power.
My films are my revenge on the sufferings of life.
My films are my revenge on the sufferings of life
Mia Hansen - Love
Léa Seydoux is very different in the film, stripped of glamour, everyday…
I absolutely wanted her in this role, because I know her talent and her magnetism.
She often impressed me at the movies, but I also saw in her the one we hadn't yet seen or seen little: a more real woman, less associated with "masculine fantasy", anchored in the simplicity of everyday life, in a form of aesthetic nudity, without accessories.
I wanted to find the reality in her.
Full screen
Melvil Poupaud and Léa Seydoux in
Un beau matin
.
Diamond Films.
And Pascal Greggory?
I've adored him for a very long time, especially with Rohmer, but I was afraid that he would find the role frightening.
But he liked the challenge and he dove with mad self-sacrifice into the character.
There is also in him this detail which is not one: he looks a lot like my father.
Her blue eyes, her elegance… Something sentimental imposed on her.
Like Nicole Garcia, whose passion, intelligence and detachment remind me of my mother.
Melvil Poupaud was also obvious.
I wanted to return to this youthfulness, this freshness that we saw in
Conte d'été.
He embodies rebirth, the opposite of paternal decline…
This film is a movement towards death in contrast to a movement towards life.
It is a philosophical choice to also go towards the light.
This is what I was already defending in
L'Avenir
or
Le Père de mes enfants.
This is also what an Eric Rohmer character says in a film: "It's the variety of life that comforts me."
I strongly believe in it, because I have experienced it.
I have a very strong relationship with the past, and, paradoxically, I have a bad memory
Mia Hansen - Love
Your father's illness has transformed him. Does making films leave an indelible trace of who you are today?
My films are my diaries, markers.
I have a very strong relationship with the past, and, paradoxically, I have a bad memory.
Films allow me to make concrete feelings, moments that would otherwise disappear.
They allow me to capture the moment, before things get lost in my fog.
My father died of Covid in nursing homes two months after I finished the script.
After the death, I would not have written the same film.
The terrible experience of his disappearance – in undignified conditions, alone, locked up – would have taken up all the space.
It's an important social subject, but I wanted to talk about him, not the Covid.
But it is a question of the dignity of the elderly…
This collective question also arose for my family and me with my father's wandering, in the end, from hospital to nursing home.
How do you preserve your dignity?
When I make films, the goal is not to transmit a message, but if a political dimension is part of my subject, I confront it.
I did not make the film to denounce life in nursing homes, but it was important to me to be faithful to my experience, to look at things in their violence, in what is open to criticism, without caricature.
I wanted to be as close as possible to the truth because I am angry against a system that is not up to our modern civilization.
Un beau matin
, by Mia Hansen-Løve, with Léa Seydoux, Melvil Poupaud, Pascal Greggory, Nicole Garcia…