Mia Hanson-Løve’s Goodbye First Love
The posters for TIFF Cinematheque’s summer retrospective sprinkled around the city are pretty hard to miss. Patterned after the French flag, their blue, white and red stripes are ubiquitous, advertising two months’ worth of French cinema programming. A festival of some of its most iconic films, the works of Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Jacques Demy are all represented.
The French New Wave, a period of filmmaking in the ‘50s and ‘60s that was often low-budget and highly visual, has produced some of the country’s most prominent films. These movies are the the big draws that entice cinephiles and aesthetes to shell out for tickets — ennui has never looked as good as it does via a cigarette stuck between two pouty lips. The blue panel of the flag-inspired poster has a still of Anna Karina, her winged eyeliner and bobbed hair resting on the shoulder of an unseen man, a still from Godard’s 1962 Vivre Sa Vie. Next to her in the white panel is Jean Seberg, all pixie-haired and stripe-shirted, from 1960’s Breathless (again, Godard). Completing the triptych in the red is another young woman gazing wistfully away, as young and conventionally pretty as the other two women, though not as instantly recognizable. This still is from Tout est Pardonné, the 2007 feature debut of writer/director Mia Hanson-Løve.
The choice to include a contemporary film with two from the 1960s as the face of the summer makes sense in the context of its programming; in its penultimate week, TIFF’s Summer in France is dedicating the weekend to the works of Hansen-Løve. The filmmaker will be in attendance to introduce her work.
Hansen-Løve’s most recent work, last year’s Goodbye First Love, screens tomorrow at 5 pm. The film follows Camille (Lola Creton), and her obsessive relationship with boyfriend Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky). When the film opens, Camille is fifteen. She is dramatic and passionate in the way that only a teenager in love can be. When Sullivan leaves for an extended trip through South America, the pair exchange long, handwritten letters and Camille tracks his progress by sticking pins through a large map on her bedroom wall.
Eventually the letters from Sullivan stop coming. The film tracks Camille’s life through her early twenties, and she eventually moves on and begins a relationship with her professor. When Sullivan returns, Camille finds herself in limbo between the two men, but Jules et Jim it ain’t.
TIFF calls Hansen-Løve “the natural heir to the French tradition of…auteurist cinema.” Her work immediately stands out on a visual level. Camille is well-dressed in the way that many young women onscreen are, and at one point she sports a Seberg-esque pixie cut, though Hanson-Løve eschews the need to over-stylize her picture. This is a directorial choice that wouldn’t normally be noteworthy for an indie flick, but does immediately separate it from the roster of films that are still being referenced in fashion spheres, where even a t-shirt from Breathless gets slick treatment 50 years later.
In a film movement so deeply entrenched in aesthetics (for better or for worse), it can be easy to get lost in the deeply romantic worlds of Hansen-Løve’s New Wave predecessors. Thematic similarities also abound; like so many French heroines before her, Camille makes some morally ambiguous decisions in the name of love. However, Hansen-Løve grounds her work firmly in reality. When Sullivan travels, he does so dissatisfied with his daily life, but his adventures take place offscreen while the story focuses on who he left behind — Camille cannot drop the obligations of her daily life to run away with him, as Anna Karina did for her lover in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou.
Camille initially takes a string of meaningless jobs to fill the time, including one job as a provocatively dressed server in a nightclub that calls to mind Karina’s role in Vivre sa Vie. However, Camille eventually moves on from these jobs that don’t interest her, and begins to follow her dream of studying architecture. The topics that Godard built entire films around, which occupied the entire grownup lives of many of his subjects (spoiler alert: a lot of Godard characters don’t make it to the end credits) are just phases that Camille goes through — things that may temporarily consume her, but are but one aspect of her life.
It’s easy to read Hansen-Løve’s work as a mirror for French auteur-driven cinema as whole. If the New Wave was its adolescent phase, filled with stylish dramatics and romantic escapism, then Hansen-Løve takes off where the others left off, bringing a subtle maturity to her craft. The haircuts may not be iconic, but the story is one worth telling.
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Anna Fitzpatrick is the web editor at WORN Fashion Journal. Follow her on Twitter at @bananafitz.
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