Father of My Children

First published on 23 Aug 2010. Updated on 23 Aug 2010.

There's something appropriate about the timing of French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve's sublime second film, Father of My Children, which arrives on the 50th anniversary of Hitchcock's Psycho. In story, the films couldn't be further apart: Hansen-Løve's follows a maverick French film producer in modern day Paris and his precarious attempts to juggle work and family life, while Hitchcock's is a tale of insanity in smalltown America. Yet both adopt a similar, audacious two-part structure that mischievously tugs the rug from beneath our feet at roughly the mid-point and asks us to reassess completely our relationships to the characters on screen.

Hansen-Løve only partially agrees with this theory: "I wanted to show the death of a film production company," she says. "If you take the company as the main protagonist, the story becomes neat and chronological."

She pulled off the same dual-tier trick with her 2007 debut, Tout Est Pardonné (‘All Is Forgiven'), in which a mother and daughter are forced to adapt to some of the father's more anti-social whims. "I see my two films as complementary to one other," she says. "The themes of mourning, reconstruction and the love between a mother and daughter are in both."

Father of My Children has been lauded for its insightful and candid depiction of the film industry, drawing positive comparisons to Altman's The Player and Truffaut's Day for Night. What makes Father of My Children so refreshing and interesting is that it feels like a visual extension of Hansen-Løve's preoccupations. Her precise understanding of middle-class mores, her constant nods to the world of independent cinema (there's a character in the film who could be a conflation of any number of maverick directors) and her love of young actors suggest a sensitive and inquisitive mind at work. "What drew me to cinema is that mix of the artistic and the spiritual," she says, "but I also like dealing pragmatically with the real world, with real things."

She admits that she only became a film lover relatively late in life. ‘When I was 16, I was studying drama and I was cast in two films by [current beau and father of her child] Olivier Assayas: Late August, Early September and Les Destinées Sentimentales. That's when it all started for me."

The Assayas connection goes further than those two films and the romance. In its representation of the workings of the film industry, Father of My Children feels very much like an update of Irma Vep, Assayas's witty 1996 chronicle of the filmmaking process. But are we supposed to read the liquidation of a boutique production company as a broader critique on the European film industry where smaller, more leftfield companies are being subsumed and asset-stripped by larger ones?

"In a sense yes, you can see it like that. But at the same time I wanted to make a very specific film about a very specific situation, about a very specific company and about a very specific person. So it's got both. There are people who have nothing to do with cinema who come up to me at the end of screenings and say to me, ‘This is my story!'"

Next she plans to make a film dealing with teenagers, again in a bourgeois setting. "Without wanting to make too many comparisons to Eric Rohmer, people always said to him, ‘Why do you always make films about young women?' And he would always reply, ‘I only speak about what I know.' I feel exactly the same way." David Jenkins