Aarshi Banerjee and Roman Kolinka: The Ultimate Trip to India.
Mia Hansen-Løve he started going to India in her “20-something”. "I've been five or six times," she says. "A lot to Goa, to Bombay, although the trip through Kerala was the one that impacted me the most." In India she wrote part of The father of my children, the film that catapulted her to relative fame in a cinephile environment that has been expanding with each new film.
"Then I had a daughter [with her ex-partner, director and screenwriter Olivier Assayas] and I couldn't go for years," she explains. But when finishing the previous film of hers, _ The future, _ with Isabelle Huppert, she found herself “lost, restless”, she felt like that mature woman that Huppert played, alone. "And I was too young to carry that acceptance of loneliness," she argues. "I needed to get back to a certain youth and sexiness." And she knew that she would find it in India.
Maya
All of Hansen-Løve's films are directly related to the moment she is living, feeling. That is why the trip to India of the protagonist of Maya is also her trip, the search for her.
His name is Gabriel (played by actor Roman Kolinka), he is a war reporter we meet when he has just been released by ISIS. He returns to Paris and he doesn't know himself, he can't be found, he is a rescued man, a hero, another companion was left behind, still kidnapped. He needs to escape from that, from himself, to find himself again and returns to India, where he spent part of his adolescence. He goes to Goa, there he sees an old friend of his parents and meets his daughter, Maya (Aarshi Banerjee), a curious, cheerful young woman, with the calm that he does not have, who will show him Goa and part of the country.
Sunsets that change your life.
The director also made part of that trip before shooting, while she was writing, and during. She wanted to know more about India. "I thought that making a film would be the best way to get to know her well and get into different layers of her society, because you have to work with people, get to know their reality," she says. “Without ever pretending that I know the country completely. In fact, the most difficult thing was to find the exact distance so that it would not be a tourist gaze and, at the same time, not pretend to be an Indian”.
And in that fair distance is where the beauty of Maya is found. For the viewer who never thought of going to India or doubted whether to go, it may be the definitive invitation. So that he already knows her, maybe it's a new vision. Mia Hansen-Løve stood on those streets with all the humility, clarity and honesty that this is her vision of her country, without wanting to pretend or impose anything.
Maya's eyes are our eyes in India.
"As a filmmaker, integrity is at the heart of everything I want to do," she says. “The way I tell stories, I shoot the world, I define the characters, how I use music so as not to manipulate. I always do it the same, but it was even more important in this movie, As a white person living in India you have to ask yourself how you fit in a place that is not your world. It is a question that I always have in my mind, I don't have the answer, what I try to do is shoot India as I see it. It's not India, it's my experience of India, it's my relationship with India."
That experience and that relationship through the gaze of Gabriel, whose eyes look at everything that Maya teaches him. He lives in a humble house in Goa, v he travels through Kerala, he takes a train alone and goes up the coast to Bombay, where his mother lives.
That same trip was made alone by the actor, Mia Hansen-Løve, the director of photography and two Indian producers. Hansen-Løve wrote as they recorded, full freedom, full instinct.
Discovering India for the first time or again.
After this filming, this trip, Hansen-Løve says that she “has changed”, she is no longer the same person. She has found the sensuality and peace that she was looking for. She was sick, very sick, but she could only keep going, and she did. "That's why for me there is a before and after this film, because I had to look inside myself and search for a strength that I didn't know I had. Now I feel prepared for many more things.” It's what India can do to you, what cinema can do to you. You have to keep traveling on screen and off it. And if you can with the same soundtrack used by the director of it.
An innocent and new love.