Indie Focus: Life, death and ‘The Father of My Children’

When talking about her new film, “The Father of My Children,” French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve can’t help but mention suicide.

The film, which opens in L.A. theaters Friday, follows an independent film producer (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) as he hustles his way around Paris, juggling projects, pulling together money for movies while caring for his wife and three children. But by describing the film’s structure, Hansen-Løve feels forced to reveal what many might consider a major spoiler; that the lead character kills himself almost exactly at the halfway mark. From there, the film hands itself over to the characters of his wife (Chiara Caselli) and teenage daughter (De Lencquesaing’s real-life daughter, Alice) to pick up the pieces of their life and his business.

“It really is impossible to talk about the film without speaking about the suicide,” Hansen-Løve, 29, said during a recent phone call from Paris. “I think maybe the best thing to do here is to quote Hitchcock, who was of the belief it wasn’t what you were going to show, but to show how it happened. It’s not the suicide that is important but the deeper, more essential questions that are around it.”

“The Father of My Children,” Hansen-Løve’s second feature, is based loosely on the life of French film producer Humbert Balsan, who took his own life in 2005. Balsan had been interested in producing Hansen-Løve’s first feature, and she began writing “Father” two years after his death. Though she did meet with Balsan’s widow — and showed her the film before anyone else — Hansen-Løve also maintained a respectful distance from her subjects.

“When I started to write the film, I didn’t really know very much about his private life, and I still really don’t,” she said of Balsan. “I knew a lot of filmmakers who worked with him and I also had visited his office a number of times. Even though my experience with him was a rather superficial experience, I felt intimately that sense of tragedy about what had happened and what it meant for people who had worked with him.

“The thing I really wanted to show was the life after the death of this man, what takes place afterwards.”

Hansen-Løve recently had her first child with her longtime boyfriend, filmmaker Olivier Assayas. The slyly offhanded structure of “The Father of My Children” is reminiscent in some ways of Assayas’ recent “Summer Hours” — both films also feature the young actress Alice de Lencquesaing — and it is not a comparison that bothers Hansen-Løve in the least.

In addition to being an intimate look at a family, “The Father of My Children” is also an affectionate take on the scrapping and hustling of the independent film business. Louis-Do De Lencquesaing’s film producer is charming and caring, as much a patron of the arts as a business partner to his filmmakers, and is it heartbreaking as the storm clouds of his inner turmoil begin to darken his disposition. The film becomes in a way an exploration of modern existence and how one strikes a balance between work life and personal life.

“I think the whole question of work versus private life is a dialectic that I’ve really been very concerned with,” said Hansen-Løve. “As for myself, now that I have a child it makes that relationship more clear. I’m interested in creating a cinema that really speaks about life, that shows life in a real way, so it’s almost paradoxical that the cinema really has become my life.”

A focus on 9/11

Part psychological shell-game, part legal-thriller, like chapters in a novel rich in detail, Laura Poitras’ new documentary, “The Oath,” moves back and forth between the lives of Abu Jandal, a onetime bodyguard of Osama bin Laden living free in Yemen, and his brother-in-law Salim Hamdan, a low-level functionary imprisoned in Guantanamo.

Poitras’ previous film, “My Country, My Country” — about the U.S. occupation of Iraq — was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary, and “The Oath,” opening Friday in Los Angeles, won a prize for its cinematography at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The two films are part of a trilogy on 9/11 and its aftermath that Poitras plans to finish with a film focused on the United States.

“With this film, the story I originally set out to make was about a Guantanamo returnee going home,” Poitras said. “I went to Yemen because so many Yemenese are being held in Guantanamo. Everything took a turn when I met Abu Jandal, and he became the focus of the film. It wasn’t originally the intention to make a film about Al-Qaeda.”

“The Oath” is particularly gripping, thanks to Poitras’ decisions regarding the film’s structure and how she reveals information about her subjects, in particular the disarmingly charismatic Abu Jandal.

“Unreliable narrators are a pretty standard trope in storytelling,” she said, “even if they don’t get used that much in documentary storytelling.”

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