Breaking Cycles: Recovering Family in the Face of Addiction
All is Forgiven is now showing at FACETS with showtimes on February 18th-20th and the 25th-27th. Fresh off the acclaimed Bergman Island, Mia Hansen-Løve’s 2007 directorial debut is now playing in the US for the first time. To celebrate our screening of it, we’re pairing it with another film about the way addiction can fray familial bonds: the 2004 Olivier Assayas film Clean.
ALL IS FORGIVEN
DIRECTED BY MIA HANSEN-LØVE
Co-winner of the 2007 Louis Delluc Prize for Best First Film alongside Celine Sciamma’s Water Lilies, Mia Hansen-Løve’s Cesar-nominated All is Forgiven is now screening at FACETS.
Mia Hansen-Løve’s film is a harrowing demonstration of the pain of losing someone to addiction, seeing them gradually become a stranger and fade out from your life. French-born Victor (Paul Blain) lives in Austria with his wife and six year old daughter. Lost in his own malaise, he drifts through each day before turning to alcohol and drugs to fill the empty spaces between writing and teaching. His wife Annette (Marie-Christine Friedrich) hopes that a move back to Paris will help Victor sort things out but it takes a personal tragedy to enact any change. Even then, that may not be enough for Victor to heal the fissures in his family life as he spirals into worse behavior.
His daughter Pamela (Victoire Rousseau), still living in Paris and now a young adult, attempts to reconnect with Victor 11 years later. She has to confront how her childhood memories are at odds with his behavior while reckoning with the divide his absence has made. Whether or not the weight of Victor’s past choices will hold back reconciliation remains at the core of Hansen-Løve’s film, one that asks us what we’re capable of forgiving within family trauma.
Over at The Wrap, Critic Dan Callahan’s review describes the power of Hansen-Løve’s filmmaking: “…[she] gets our point of view to shift regarding what we have been seeing, both in the moment and after we have had time to consider it in a larger context.” Skillful in its depiction of the passage of time, All is Forgiven is a grounded, unflinching portrait of the damaging behaviors that addiction indulges. Hansen-Løve’s debut gestures at the personal stories which define her subsequent work and her skills at inspiring performances where viewers must doubt their natural sympathies.
Watch All is Forgiven in-person at the FACETS Cinema on the weekends of February 18th-20th and 25th-27th, 2022.
CLEAN
DIRECTED BY OLIVIER ASSAYAS
As a companion piece to All is Forgiven, we’re suggesting another film whose themes orbit around family and overcoming addiction: Olivier Assayas’ 2004 film Clean.
Hansen-Løve and Assayas are contemporaries in the modern French film scene and both wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma before becoming filmmakers. When she started out as an actor, Hansen-Løve actually performed in Assayas’ films Sentimental Desires and Late August, Early September and their relationship is at least partially believed to be the inspiration for Bergman Island. Though we don’t want to focus too heavily on that latter fact, it lends an interesting element of context to what themes they focus on in their work.
Starring Maggie Cheung, of Assayas’ Irma Vep, Clean is about Emily Wang, former video DJ and current addict, finding a way to kick her habit in order to reconnect with her son. Coming off a prison stint, she finds him in the custody of his paternal grandparents (Nick Nolte and Martha Henry) who prefer that she takes some time away before reentering her son’s life.
She commits to finding a way to kick her habit while working at a relative-owned restaurant in Paris, and despite setbacks begins looking for ways to reforge the trust she’s lost. Featuring Cheung’s talent for singing, the film is an unflinching portrait of damaged, but not broken, people attempting to reconnect.
Assayas has an eye for the starkness of its locales: the industrial landscapes of Canada, cramped hotel rooms, heavily used cars. But it’s Cheung’s performance which makes it a powerful companion to All is Forgiven as they show two poles of the road to recovering family after addiction. The film itself received a nomination for the Palme d’Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, but Cheung won the festival’s award for best actress with her performance. It remains a milestone in her career and stands as her last lead role before shifting her focus to composing and philanthropy as well as a marker for the next phase of Assayas’ filmmaking.
Rent Clean on DVD from FACETS today.
Richard Hooper is an Editorial Assistant Intern at FACETS and has been working his way through Shōhei Imamura’s filmography during the winter months. He has an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago where he wrote his thesis on intermediality in animated film. Working with film practically and critically, a piece of his heart will always belong with 35mm projection.