Løving/Losing
Reconsidering Mia Hansen-Løve's trilogy of high-stakes fragility
Two ideas recur in conversation with friends: projecting strength and concealing vulnerability. It follows that if you are the kind of person who appears strong, determined, capable, it then becomes quite easy—second nature, even—to hide frailty. And it becomes even easier for those around you to pretend the latter is not there, and never was. In this rendering, the strong person shows up; does what they say they’re going to do, and on time; doesn’t express big, difficult emotions in public; is low-strung, tactful, good girl, daddy. We don’t exclusively associate this strength with a “male” ideal. In fact, a lot of men (and people, generally, probably) think they’re projecting strength when they’re projecting insecurity: The dance of avoidance, low-maintenance, brevity, elision, “I’ve got a lot going on”. But strength is assertive, present, doesn’t need to state its obligations as an excuse; it is not “tough,” per se, but solid. Not so easily gendered.
Re-watching Goodbye First Love (2011), I recognize something. French director Mia Hansen-Løve presents a trilogy premised on these ideas which pierce my and my friends’ relationships. (The rest of the trilogy: Bergman Island, 2021, and One Fine Morning, 2022.) The first time I saw Goodbye First Love, in 2012, I was 18, the same age as the lead actress Lola Créton, at the time. In the film, she plays Camille, a 15 year old, then a college student, then a grown woman. At 15, Camille is in love with Sullivan, a 19 year-old searcher who loves her back in his strategically detached way. They’re together, but Camille is keenly aware of Sullivan’s unreliability—he wants to maintain independence from her so that he doesn’t become too reliant before he takes off to South America with friends, and while you understand the logic of his behavior, you feel that his methods are condescending, certainly withholding and, to some degree, manipulative. Camille is very young, so no one, not even the object of her affection, takes her passion seriously.
I remember finding the actor who played Sullivan, Sebastian Urzendowsky, dreamy at the time; and Créton, of course, impossibly, casually beautiful. At 18, I had been infatuated, romantically tortured even, but never truly in love. I found the film overwrought, Too French, emotionally absurd. Rewatching it at 30, I find Urzendowsky’s Sullivan embarrassingly boyish and dilettantish and Créton’s Camille impressive in her intensity and elegance and the film’s tone and characterizations achingly true. Camille loses Sullivan to his internal search; she also loses her mind; she survives; becomes an architect; meets another, even older man, her professor and mentor, Lorenz (Magne Brekke), who is steady and admiring in his love, loving Camille not (it seems, or at least as Hansen-Løve tells it) primarily for her youth or beauty but for her mind as well as her ability to project strength and fragility at once.
After eight years of no contact, Sullivan returns to her—she’s changed in nearly every way but her passion for him; he hasn’t changed really at all.
Hansen-Løve makes films of disappearance and reappearance, of passage, of yearning, of the loneliness that persists even within intimacy, of the sadness that propels a person towards art. She tells these semi-autobiographical tales of a young woman simultaneously pulled back to the past and caught up in time. Bergman Island (2021) plays the most delicately with the resource, transposing a film within a film (and with the looming œuvre and personal life of Ingmar Bergman) as, in part, a way of subverting the flashback. We never see flashbacks in any of Hansen-Løve’s films. Film is memory—don’t show the past; make it up.
One Fine Morning (2022) presents fortitude as complicated acts of devotion. Léa Seydoux plays Sandra, a translator, widow and single mother. Sandra’s father, Georg (Pascale Greggory), has been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease called Benson’s syndrome, and increasingly requires more care, which she, in part, facilitates. Her mother Françoise (Nicole Garcia), long divorced from her father, helps considerably, but has long moved on emotionally. And Georg, who can no longer see, is only able to hold on to his emotional memory, and increasingly, only of Leila, his partner, who spends as much time with him as she can, but cannot be his primary caretaker due to her own health problems. At the same time, Sandra bumps into an old friend, Clément, a scientist who is married and has a child of his own. They fall in love. Sandra cries a lot.
Thinking about this very personal trilogy in my own, very personal terms, I’m struck by the way each protagonist is so openly emotional and vulnerable to the person, and people, she loves—to her lovers, parents, friends, child. Camille, Sandra and Bergman Island’s Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Amy (Mia Wasikowska, who plays both the protagonist in Chris’s film and herself, in Hansen-Løve’s film) each refuse or are at least unable to conceal fragility. The men around them also struggle, but usually with limited or aborted expressions—the things they don’t say, aren’t willing to say or reveal too late. But these women, at significant personal risk (of rejection, embarrassment, shame and devastation), make their feelings clear. The timing is never perfect; the receivers are never quite prepared; there are often other women or men or children or obligations to consider … a lot going on.
The trilogy lays bare an alternative kind of strength to the one my friends and I hypothesize—one that may be harder to embody, let alone project. It’s the kind that isn’t categorically correct and usually won’t win you approval. It’s where desire meets uncertainty and where risk undoes any illusions of guarantee; where you ask for what you want, and don’t wait for permission, but live it, let it ripple off you, whatever the consequence.
There’s that line from Paul Simon’s Graceland, “and she said ‘losing love/ is like a window in your heart/ everybody sees you’re blown apart/ everybody sees the wind blow.” I fantasize about that window. So many people my age talk about the fear of “being perceived,” but it has to be, for all of us, more of a desire. We talk and talk but in there, somewhere, we know it: Love is enough of a reason to hurt*.
As of very recently, films are again an engine for my imaginative life. They left me some years ago when I made them into a career. In a moment of desperation they returned. Relying on them in this way again takes me back to being 15—frustrated, alone and steeped in fantasy. I’m much more connected now (“in community,” as it were), and solid. Still, versions of yourself never evacuate. You make things—essays, stories, poems, songs—which might release their hold on you. But they’re always around in case you need them.
*And yes, of course, this—and, to me, all love—excludes abuse.