![Mia Hansen-Løve & Charlotte Wells Discuss Fact, Fiction, & The Cinema of Memory [NYFF]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/13124822/Mia-Hansen-Love-Charlotte-Wells-Aftersun.jpg "Mia Hansen-Løve & Charlotte Wells Discuss Fact, Fiction, & The Cinema of Memory [NYFF]")
Two filmmakers renowned for recent works of autofiction, Mia Hansen-Løve and Charlotte Wells, are both riveted by the process of blending details from their lives together with invented artistic elements. At the 60th New York Film Festival last Saturday, the filmmakers convened inside Lincoln Center’s Francesca Beale Theater for an hour-long conversation about their NYFF Main Slate selections.
Presented within the festival’s buzzy Talks section, the “Crosscuts” event — moderated by Film Comment co-deputy editor Devika Girish, who co-programmed this year’s Talks with Maddie Whittle — packed the amphitheater.
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In “Aftersun,” Wells’ feature debut, an 11-year-old girl (Francesca Corio) vacations with her father (Paul Mescal) at a Turkish holiday resort in the late 1990s. Throughout the film, which was inspired by Wells’ relationship with her own father, flashes of the daughter years later suggest that “Aftersun” is told from the perspective of her as an adult, looking back on the holiday.
In Hansen-Løve’s eighth feature, “One Fine Morning,” a Parisian single mother (Léa Seydoux) navigates complicated relationships with two men: her ailing father (Pascal Greggory), who must be relocated to a care home, and a married friend (Melvil Poupaud), with whom she begins an affair. Like her other films, including “Bergman Island” and “Things to Come,” Hansen-Løve’s latest is personal, reflecting the filmmaker’s experience of her own father’s decline from a degenerative disease.
“It’s imagination and experience meeting; fiction comes from that,” Hansen-Løve said, describing the role of creative invention within her cinema. “It allows me to give a certain rhythm to the chaos of life. Life is all the emotions and experiences that we make; it’s difficult to find the right distance, but making it into a story without betraying what it’s really about means giving [life] a frame.”
“To look at it means finding a distance,” she continued. “That doesn’t mean betraying the truth. It just means finding the essence of the experience. It’s a quest for truth, and in order to reach it, I need the tools of cinema to transform it into another language that brings a rhythm to it. I feel I understand more about my relationship to my father after making this film.”
Discussing connections and distinctions between their filmmaking styles, Hansen-Løve and Wells often lingered on the creative process of blurring fact with fiction. Memory already exists somewhere between these two opposites, they agreed, and the profusion of imaginative details at play in cinema offers opportunities for filmmakers to pull stories, even ones rooted in personal truth, further from reality.
“There’s a risk, when you take a memory and transform it into a scene in a film, that you overwrite the memory,” Wells said. “You set this thing that’s very amorphous and opaque, and you make it real again.” To preserve her memories while drawing upon them to craft scenes in “Aftersun,” she kept a diary in order to separate what she actually remembers of an experience from its cinematic translation. Being conscious of the distinction has led Wells to further consider photography as an avenue for both capturing and distorting memories: “I often feel that I remember a moment, but I think I just remember the photograph,” she said.
The word “autobiographical,” often applied to their work, has come to haunt both filmmakers. “I’ve been used to that word — autobiographical — since I started making films, because it’s the word that was always used to define how I write, because it’s easier,” Hansen-Løve said, pointing out she’s been making films about father-daughter relationships since her feature debut, “All Is Forgiven,” though she’d never claimed the character dynamics in that film — about a daughter coming to terms with her father’s addictions and neglect — mirrored any relationship she’d had.
“I’d said it was inspired by somebody I knew,” Hansen-Løve clarified, explaining that the story was based on the experiences of her uncle, but that she was often identified as an autobiographical filmmaker as “All Is Forgiven” was released. “One Fine Morning,” she added, is closer to personal autobiography, though she prefers to avoid the term altogether. “The emotions are very close to mine, and they come from my experience of life,” she said. “And, yes, my film was inspired by my relationship with my father, whom I also lost. But there are many other elements that come in through the process of writing.”
In making her feature debut with “Aftersun,” Wells similarly had reservations about describing the film as “emotionally autobiographical” and seeks to maintain separation between the film’s story and her own experience. “It’s constantly negotiating that line, and some days I’m willing to acknowledge that line,” she said. “The film feels close on some days, and on other days I have to keep it at arm’s length.”
Wells has acknowledged that “Aftersun” was inspired by her relationship with her late father, with whom she once vacationed in Turkey. “That is the core relationship, and the grief that I feel at his death is the core emotion expressed,” she said. “Alongside portraying a very loving relationship, I’m looking back and wondering what was, thinking about the way things weren’t as they seemed, about what I saw as a child and what I know as an adult. But there were different parts of this process that were more or less fictional, and in the end it sits somewhere in between.”
Girish asked both filmmakers how their memories of cinema informs their work. Hansen-Løve has frequently expressed admiration for the legendary French filmmaker Éric Rohmer, noting his measured and intellectual style as an influence on her own. But in casting Greggory, one of Rohmer’s frequent collaborators, she explained that she sought a kind of resonance deeper than imitation. “In the cinephile imagination, [Greggory] represents speech, or words,” she explained. “And that’s something that interested me, because the character he plays in my film is someone who loses the ability to speak, to use words. I think that’s something we can feel, whether or not we know these films he’s associated with.”
Added Hansen-Løve: “I wanted people to feel they’d heard him before, and though I’m showing him at a moment when he cannot speak properly when he’s losing his memories and the ability to speak in an articulate way, the fact that he’s an intellectual — even for people who didn’t know his Rohmer films — is something he brings with him as an actor. I was interested in people feeling that there’s a world behind him.”
Wells, meanwhile, stressed that her process is not consciously imitative, but she acknowledged the influence of rave scenes from Lynne Ramsay’s “Morvern Callar” and underwater sequences from Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” as more direct visual references on “Aftersun,” also naming Chantal Akerman’s “La Chambre,” Wim Wenders’ “Alice in the Cities,” and the films of Tsai Ming-Liang as influences. “I have a different relationship to how films I love find their way into my work,” she said.
As the conversation drew on, both filmmakers also reflected on the role of objects in their cinema. After making her second feature, “Father of My Children,” which was inspired by the passing of producer Humbert Balsan, Hansen-Løve began considering the “cinematographic power” that physical objects can possess. “What remains of him and his soul?” Hansen-Løve recalled thinking while making that film. “Do the films he produced say something about who he was, his presence? Is there heritage, and does it transit or travel through objects?
In “One Fine Morning,” the father figure is gradually losing his mind to Benson’s syndrome, a variant of Alzheimer’s disease, and the daughter must determine what to do with his vast collection of books while moving him into a home. As the film progresses, “she hangs onto this idea that his soul is staying through his books,” Hansen-Løve said. The filmmaker used her own father’s books in “One Fine Morning,” taking the occasion of the film to retrieve them from a box in her friend’s basement. “More than their emotional value, I believe in them as something that is a celebration of the invisible and spiritual.”
Wells’ “Aftersun,” meanwhile, frequently features footage recorded on a miniDV camera, which adds to the holiday’s period texture while providing a frame for the film’s timelines. The miniDV camera is new as its father and daughter use it to record their vacation; later, by the time the adult daughter plays it back, the device feels like a relic. “I think of objects in this film as evocations,” Wells said. “They carry forward. They preserve and hold all this time.”
Free and open to the public, the one-hour event was organized by Talks programmers Devika Girish and Maddie Whittle, in association with NYFF executive director Eugene Hernandez and artistic director Dennis Lim.
“Aftersun” releases Oct. 21, via A24. “One Fine Morning” is out later this year, via Sony Pictures Classics.
