ALL IS FORGIVEN: Mia Hansen-Løve’s Quietly Audacious Debut

With her latest film, Bergman Island, earning raves everywhere it plays, there’s no time like the present for Mia Hansen-Løve’s debut feature, All is Forgiven, to get a long-overdue theatrical run in the United States courtesy of Metrograph Pictures. Winner of the Louis Delluc Prize for Best First Film in 2007 (shared with Céline Sciamma’s Water Lilies), All is Forgiven chronicles the breakdown of a family and a daughter’s attempt to understand the real reasons why many years later. With its bold use of time jumps and refreshing lack of excessive sentimentality, the film is an early showcase of the unique storytelling sensibility that Hansen-Løve continues to display with increasing sophistication in her work.

Family Matters

The film begins in Vienna in 1995, where French writer Victor (Paul Blain) struggles with his lack of desire to work. His partner, Austrian-born Annette (Marie-Christine Friedrich), wants him to try teaching French again or reading manuscripts, or anything else that will make her friends and family stop thinking of him as a layabout. Instead, Victor spends his days playing with their young daughter, Pamela (Victoire Rousseau), and drifting around the city, feeding his covert drug addiction. He has no motivation to find a job, only his next score.

The family returns to Paris in the hope that the familiar environs will pull Victor out of his slump; instead, he sinks deeper into a pit of incessant self-pity that can only be cured (or at least temporarily forgotten) by getting high. When Annette finally leaves him with Pamela in tow, he embarks on an affair with an impulsive fellow addict named Gisèle (Olivia Ross) that can only end poorly for all involved.

An eleven-year time-jump later, and teenage Pamela (Constance Rousseau, playing the older version of her younger sister in a clever bit of casting) learns that the father she barely remembers would like to see her again. Without her disapproving mother’s knowledge, Pamela agrees to meet him. But her father’s version of the events surrounding their family’s dissolution is not quite the same as her mother’s, leaving Pamela to dredge up and reinterpret old memories through a lens that is not her father’s, nor her mother’s, but uniquely her own.

Time and Place

With each jump forward in time—three months, one week, eleven years—one is given a glimpse of the most pivotal moments that led to Victor and Annette’s acrimonious split, from Victor meeting Gisèle and shooting up with her for the first time to Victor’s drug-and-alcohol-fueled bout of rage when Annette comes home late one night, shoving her to the floor and screaming that he despises her. Hansen-Løve doesn’t ask us to sympathize with him or to condemn him, merely to witness how an intelligent man with a beautiful family could throw it all away so stupidly in moments of despair. Annette is given a similarly equanimous portrayal in All is Forgiven; she is obviously the more responsible parent of the two, but in pressuring Victor to be less of a loser without contemplating how that might affect his fragile psyche, or taking off with Pamela and then telling her daughter that Victor was the one who left, her hands are not entirely clean either.

Indeed, the only character that one truly, unequivocally sympathizes with in All is Forgiven is Pamela, the young woman who has to dig up her own past and sort through the lies previously told to her. Only by making her own decisions in this regard, instead of allowing the adults in her life to do it for her, can she too cross the threshold from childhood to adulthood. As the older Pamela, Constance Rousseau has that luminous, fresh-faced beauty that every teenage girl in France seems to have—well, at least in the movies—that the rest of the world can only envy. Her performance is marvelously subtle and natural; her scenes with Blain (also excellent) when they are first reunited have a palpable awkwardness mixed with affection that feels truly authentic. You want her to reconnect with her father, but even more than that, you want her father to finally be worthy of reconnecting with her.

Hansen-Løve’s movies always boast well-curated soundtracks, and All is Forgiven is no exception. During the party that leads to Victor shooting up with Gisèle, there is a raucous singalong of a cover of The Kinks’ “Lola” that brings to mind all the best drunken get-togethers one has ever had. The cover is from British post-punk band The Raincoats, who contribute several other mood-setting tracks to the film’s soundtrack. Another standout is Rory and Alex McEwen’s folksy rendition of “Mary Hamilton,” the sixteenth-century ballad about a lady-in-waiting who has an affair with a king, gets pregnant, kills the baby, gets caught, and is executed. A bit unpleasant, yes, but the guitar’s delicate nature and the vocals make the song go down sweeter than one would expect. It’s the perfect combination of dark and lovely to suit a film like All is Forgiven.

Conclusion

Mia Hansen-Løve was only twenty-six when she wrote and directed All is Forgiven; naturally, her style has become more polished and her preoccupations more mature as her career has progressed. Nonetheless, All is Forgiven is a wonderful glimpse of the artist as a young woman that fans of Bergman Island and her other work should find time to see.

What do you think? Are you a fan of Mia Hansen-Løve’s movies? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

All is Forgiven opens in theaters and on digital exclusively via Metrograph on November 5, 2021, before expanding across the U.S. on November 19, 2021.

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