All Is Forgiven at UW Cinematheque

Annette (Marie-Christine Friedrich) and her young daughter Pamela (Victoire Rousseau) listen to the piano at a family gathering.

Excerpt from Alisyn Amant’s review:

As Mia Hansen-Løve’s directorial debut, All Is Forgiven (2007) is the logical birthplace of the cinematic tone that becomes distinct in her later films, like Bergman Island (2021). She immerses viewers in moments of intense realism with characters Victor, Annette, and Pamela in the majority of the 105-minute running time. Take, for example, the portrayal of Victor’s addiction: one may expect the archetypal, gritty, and raucous scene of a person shooting heroin into their veins or snorting cocaine amidst dancing bodies and loud music. In All Is Forgiven, the picture of addiction instead becomes a man wandering from park to park to find a dealer, slipping away from outings with his daughter to run “errands” and waking up to the anticlimactic overdose of a lover. The expository tension between a dependence on drugs and the decay of a family still makes room for the subtle details of life: the sound of shoes on pavement or gravel, the ripples of water on the surface of a pond, the rustling of leaves and flowers.

While that pervading sense of reality successfully creates an intelligent, picturesque aura, it simultaneously becomes a detriment to the viewer’s ability to connect with its characters as fixtures in a story. Moments that are supposed to be seen as monumental and emotional, according to the typicality of narrative structure, fall flat in service to realism. But regardless of one’s preference for the levels of tilt toward realism or romanticism, All Is Forgiven is nonetheless an admirable debut that showcases the cinematic notions of a then-budding, now-established director.