Filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love has previously had “autobiographical” tagged to her work, often erroneously.
While Hansen-Love has drawn from her own life, never before One Fine Morning (known in French as Un Beau Matin) has it been such a direct inspiration. And you can feel it in every frame of this superb film – there’s an intimacy, familiarity and lived-in quality to One Fine Morning that’s come from Hansen-Love’s own experiences.
Sandra, the character portrayed with seemingly effortless naturalism by Lea Seydoux, may as well be Hansen-Love’s onscreen avatar. It’s a stellar performance, and a reminder of Seydoux’s potent talents outside of the Bond franchise.
The Paris-set story is one of patience and generosity, as it grapples with one of life’s most challenging events – when a parent starts to fade from themselves, and from the rhythms of your life with them.
Sandra is a single mum juggling her job as a translator, caring for her young daughter Linn, and also caring for her father Georg (Pascal Greggory), a former philosophy academic diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease.
Georg has managed with help in his own book-lined apartment, but it’s come to a point where he needs full-time care in a facility. Sandra, her sister and her mother, who is divorced from her dad, start to scout for suitable places but it’s far from an easy task trying to secure a room in an affordable home.
At the same time, Sandra starts a romance with Clement (Melvil Poupaud), a friend of her late husband’s. What she and Clement have is charged, and not because for the married Clement, it’s an illicit affair. It’s fresh and giddy in an understated way, a renewed, almost disbelieving joy that such feelings are still possible.
But One Fine Morning also understands the complexity of a romance that coincides with the grief of losing a parent even while their body is still tethered to this Earth. Not to mention that Clement’s unsuspecting wife is present in the frame.
Hansen-Love balances these seemingly competing elements of a character’s experience so that they’re actually always symbiotic. It’s in the mess that One Fine Morning thrives – Sandra finds more meaning in her father’s plight because she’s starting something new with Clement.
Beginnings and endings are entwined, and there’s a tenderness to Hansen-Love’s film because she’s been through the profound sadness. That authenticity is splashed across the screen, including her choice to film scenes in the same room her own father – who, like Georg, had Benson’s syndrome – had been.
Hansen-Love has often excelled at telling a humanist story. Whether it be Father of My Children, Maya, Bergman Island or now One Fine Morning, her works are driven by this curiosity of how people get through it all, of how they live.
Rating: 4.5/5
One Fine Morning is in cinemas now