Or take one of Krieps’s best scenes, in a moment as simple as toothbrushing, vaguely sketched out on the page before coming alive during filming. She’s giggling to herself; the water running under the tap spurts a little, as it often does in old houses with rusty plumbing, and she bursts out laughing. You see her spirit here, a charm Hansen-Løve’s camera catches and never lets go of. Roth watches on from the bed, a bit befuddled.
Roth, however, was uncomfortable with the scene, particularly its intimacy. Hansen-Løve uses this as an example of how the tension between her and Roth’s perspectives ultimately enriched the film’s thorny exploration of gender dynamics within a marriage of artists. “It was as if the unconsciousness of the film was revealed through his attitude and his relationship to the film—and in the end, it made sense,” she says.
Léa Seydoux, perhaps concurrently, has come to prefer female directors. “With men, it’s more like you are more of an object of desire, and when a woman films you, it’s more like an alter ego,” thealum tells me. In the case of Hansen-Løve, this proved literal by working off the director’s memories of caring for her dying father: “When you play someone’s life, you can’t lie.”plunges into the personal. Seydoux calls the experience “almost like a diary.