Mia Hansen-Love’s new film One Fine Morning packs into 112 minutes an epic tale of tragic degeneration and hard-earned rejuvenation. Recently premiered on MUBI, the French-language drama is one of Hansen-Love’s most acutely observed and finest works.
One Fine Morning is suffused with the unshowy staging, subtle shifts in emotion, and naturalistic performances that characterise Hansen-Love’s cinema. Her screenplay has the flow of a great vast river as well as the serenity of a garden pond.
Sandra (Lea Seydoux), a single mother with a precocious daughter named Linn (Camille Leban Martins), is at a vulnerable stage in her life. Sandra’s job as a translator has set into a routine. Her beloved father Georg (Pascal Greggory) is slowly being eaten away by Benson’s Syndrome.
Georg has lost his sight and will soon lose his bearings, leading to rounds of care homes that will be familiar to anybody who has had to look after ailing parents. A chance encounter with old friend Clement (Melvil Poupaud) keeps Sandra going. The passionate affair has its complications, which are compounded by Georg’s increasingly precarious situation.
Cinematographer Denis Lenoir, who has previously collaborated with Hansen-Love on her Things to Come (2016) and Bergman Island (2021), keeps his framing simple and unfussy. Quick cuts between sequences map the passage of time. This is a narrative packed with the small threads that make up the tapestry of life. They appear monumental in the moment but are ultimately only part of a larger design that cannot be avoided, however painful.
There are nods to the precariousness of contemporary existence. When climate change is as much of a threat as a random terror attack, comfort can be found in everyday rituals and family ties, the film movingly demonstrates.
A date at a park reduces Sandra and Clement to giddy teenagers. A Christmas party with a make-believe Santa is proof that even in cynical times, the power of imagination thrives.
While there are excellent performances from the cast, especially Camille Leban Martins as Linn, two actors dominate the show. Lea Seydoux’s Sandra is the kind of sensitive, conflicted and intelligent woman that Hansen-Love excels at writing. Seydoux’s ability to explore Sandra’s anguish, whether at Clement’s waffling or Georg’s decline, is especially powerful since it is barely spelt out.
Pascal Greggory is tremendous as Georg, a philosophy professor who is gutted at his inability to access the world of ideas. Greggory brings dignity and poignancy to his performance, echoing the words of his mother in the film: “You must show that you’re there. You are a living person.”
Also in the ‘Start the week with a film’ series
‘Network’ is a revealing satire about the decline of TV news
‘Under the Shadow’ is much more than a ghost story
‘Beanpole’ provides a Russian perspective on the insanity of war
