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All is Forgiven

[imdb] - [wikipedia]

On 35mm at the Clay Theater during the 51st SFIFF with Lucía, on 4 May 2008, at 15:00.

Skipping over the three short-film series that I saw (a collection of animations, childrens’ animations, and films by teenagers), my first feature film at this year’s film festival was Tout est pardonné, the first feature from Mia Hansen-Løve. She cast it primarily with non-professional actors, and the results are very good. Between this and Le Voyage du ballon rouge, I think it will be a good year of films for me. :-)

Much like Le Voyage du ballon rouge, Tout est pardonné is akin to the sort of what I will call ‘observationalist’ or ‘neo-Neorealist’ film that I am so attracted to. While much more narrative-oriented than the other films I would put in this category, the method of filmmaking still seems to be about allowing a narrative and set of characters grow out of a series of moving snapshots from the characters’ lives and settings, many of which could almost be chosen at random. This seems to work best with non-professional actors, and while Hansen-Løve has a very strong story to tell, complete with pivotal plot points, she still seems quite dedicated to letting the characters develop out of the little behaviors of the actors. If she had chosen to remove the story and let one section of the film spread out to fill the whole runtime, she would have had a film very similar in philosophy to Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s.

The film is about a troubled writer whose life is gradually spinning out of control. As he finds himself pushing the ones he loves further and further out of the way, he becomes involved with a drifter addicted to heroin. When she ODs one morning, he goes to hospital for treatment, and when his wife comes to see him, he finds out that he’s crossed the line too many times and that she no longer wants him in her (or their daughter’s) life—they move to Venezuela.

The rest of the film is devoted to the daughter, who has moved back to Paris with her mother and finds out that her father is still living there (her mother had told her that he had long since moved to China). They meet twice, and then he dies.

The story of the film is very simple, and most of the film is devoted to incidental scenes that reveal a little at a time about the characters or their relationships. A lot of what might be considered ‘necessary’ information is omitted, and we are left to imagine it. To understand the struggle that the husband and wife go through, we must imagine what it was like before, as well as the unbalanced dynamic of the relationship over the years (we probably glimpse more of this from his sister’s perspective than from anywhere else). We must imagine what he went through over the years as he tried to pull himself together to make himself worthy of being in his daughter’s life. We must imagine what her childhood was like, to be close to her father, and then yanked out of life in Paris to live with her mother who was never willing to tell her anything true about her father. Most of all, however, we must imagine what the mother goes through once she finds out that her daughter and husband have reconnected.

I asked the director during the Q&A whether she had chosen to leave this last perspective out in the script, or whether it was something that got taken out of the film later, during the process of making the film. The director responded that it was part of the film from the very start, and that she had made this “cruel” decision to leave out the mother’s perspective in part because the film was about the daughter and father, but also largely because it was, in a sense, needed to respect the mother’s decision to remove him from her life.