Reviewed by GREG KING
Director: Mia Hansen-Love
Stars: Lea Seydoux, Pascal Greggory, Melvil Poupaud, Camille Leban Martins, Nicole Garcia.
Following its screenings at the Alliance Francaise Film Festival, One Fine Morning (Une Beau Matin) gets a cinematic release on the art house circuit. This is the eighth feature film for actress turned director Mia Hansen-Love, and like most of her work it deals with complicated relationships and the everyday struggles of ordinary people. This is a slice of life film and Hansen-Love portrays her ordinary characters with authenticity, heart and compassion.
The film centres around Sandra Kienzler (played by Lea Seydoux, from the Bond film No Time To Die, etc), a widow juggling her work as a translator with the demands of caring for her eight-year-old daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins) and caring for her aged father Georg (Pascall Greggory, from La Vie En Rose, etc), a former respected professor of philosophy, who is blind and suffering from the onset of a rare neurological disorder. The character of Georg is apparently based on Hansen-Love’s own father and his illness. Sandra often helps her father with meals and the housework, But then she and her sisters are forced to try and find an aged care facility to care for their father. As Sandra helps to pack up her father’s extensive collection of books which he can no longer read, she admits that she feels closer to them than she does to her father.
Then she has a chance meeting with a former friend in Clement (Melvil Poupaud, from Summer of 85, etc), a Cosmo chemist who travels the world looking for extraterrestrial debris, a rather esoteric profession. Clement is a former student of her father’s, and he is now married with a young son of his own. A relationship develops between the pair, and this opens her up to exploring other possibilities with her life. Clement is plagued by feelings of guilt over his adulterous relationship.
One Fine Morning spans some three years and unfolds at a leisurely pace, but it does seem episodic at times. The film deals with some universal themes such as sex, grief, love, death, family and relationships. The characters are well rounded and three dimensional, and it is obvious that Hansen-Love cares for them and wants audiences to similarly identify with them and their everyday struggles. Hansen-Love has an understated style and a naturalistic approach to the material. The film takes its title from the autobiography that Georg intended to write.
Hansen-Love wrote the character of Sandra specifically with Seydoux in mind, and she delivers a sublime, nicely nuanced performance that conveys her range of emotional responses to the daily challenges she faces. Greggory also delivers a fine performance as her ailing father, and he makes his fading memory and confusion all the more touching. Seydoux and Poupaud develop a strong chemistry as well that makes their relationship believable and their obvious rapport elevates the emotional heart of the film.
The film has been nicely shot by her regular collaborator Denis Lenoir who uses tracking shots and deliberate framing to explore the characters and their emotional journey. Named Best European Film at Director’s Fortnight in Cannes in 2022, One Fine Morning is an intimate little film that will resonate strongly with fans of Hansen-Love’s previous works, although it may not appeal to mainstream audiences and those who flock to special effects driven superhero movies.
★★☆
