French director Mia Hansen-Løve has become one of my favorite filmmakers. Her stories about “ordinary” life and relationships, and her style, are so relaxed and organic that the world inside her films seems completely natural, without artifice. I say it “seems,” even though of course there is a definite artistic method at work, but one that draws us comfortably into a movie as if it were home. Her latest is one of her best: it’s called One Fine Morning.
Léa Seydoux plays Sandra, a widowed single mother who works as a translator for events with English or German speakers. She dotes on her young daughter Linn, is coolly proficient in her work, and also happens to be caring for her aging father, a former philosophy professor played by the great Pascal Greggory, who is suffering from a rare form of dementia that causes blindness, among other symptoms.
This man whose career was devoted to the act of thinking, has been robbed of his main source of joy, which was reading books, and now he often isn’t even sure where he is. His family, Sandra and another daughter, and their mother, divorced from him for years but still friendly, has come to an agreement that he can no longer stay unattended for any length of time and should be moved to a nursing home. The film chronicles, from Sandra’s point of view, the painful ordeal of finding an appropriate facility for his care. As always, Hansen-Løve presents people’s lives as a mundane everyday reality rather than as drama, and Sandra’s doubt and grief are all the more vivid for it.
One evening, she runs into a married friend, Clément, played by Melvil Poupaud. He was first a friend of her late husband’s, and then a compassionate confidante for her during her time of grief. It’s been a few years, but they slip right back into the ease and sympathy of their friendship, only to see it soon become more than that. He’s already told her that he’s become distant from his wife—there is less inhibition to battle when they fall, willingly, into being lovers.
When depicting sex, Hansen-Løve is as unpretentious as in all other aspects of her work. She’s unfazed by bodies, or by the occasional awkwardness of erotic life, and the film never gets that “staged for the camera” look that afflicts so many sex scenes in films. Also insightful is how the initial hunger for one another’s bodies is typical of relationships in their earlier stages, but begins to take a back seat to substantial issues involving honesty, commitment, and respect. Clément has a young son, and this prompts him to have second thoughts about divorce. The relationship develops into a familiar dance of “come here, go away,” which becomes stressful for Sandra, to say the least. Her own desire to set a boundary is tempered by her daughter Linn’s adoring feelings towards her mom’s boyfriend, and she can see that the girl is unhappy during the “go away” phases of the relationship.
The story doesn’t need to rely on surprise, and whatever happens are merely circumstances surrounding our main interest, which are the characters, especially Sandra. Léa Seydoux has become a glamorous movie star, and has even played a Bond girl, but here she is, without makeup, embodying this passionate and melancholy character with total conviction. One Fine Morning shows just what it’s like when grief and hardship are happening to us at the same time as romance and renewal.
