Tout est pardonné

dir. Mia Hansen-Love
France, 2007

The first film by the director of The Father of My Children and Goodbye, First Love. All the components of these later films are there, in unsurprisingly less polished or controlled ways: long temporal periods, often with a "before/after" structure, here it's Vienna 1995, France 2006; the way the film eventually comes round to its central concern, the coming-of-age of a teenage girl, but how her 6 year-old self is peripheral in the first half except somehow you realise she's also central; the use of British folk music, somehow as a soundtrack of maturation; absent or problematic fathers. One day I'll write about this properly.