In Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning, cinema appears twice as equally ambivalent. First, the short film form becomes a metaphor for euthanasia, and then, a screening room offers the protagonist Sandra (Léa Seydoux) the safety to cry undisturbed. Reminiscent of the meta-marvel that was Bergman Island, but working on a smaller scale, Hansen-Løve’s new offering sees film as a costly salvation.
We meet Sandra just as she’s taking the difficult decision to place her ailing father Georg (Pascal Greggory) in a nursing home, his life as a philosophy professor now surrendered to a neurodegenerative disease. At the same time, she rekindles an old flame with married man Clément (Melvil Poupaud), a friend of her late husband and a father of a boy the age of her daughter.
From the film’s opening, we can’t help but notice the walls of books in Georg’s apartment, a silent witness to his worsening condition. Among the titles worthy of studious close-ups are ones by Hölderlin, Hannah Arendt, and Thomas Mann, an extended metonymy for his life, his intellectual seeking, and the stability he no longer can count on. Unsurprisingly, both Sandra and the French director—a philosophers’ daughter herself— share a devotion to the worlds bound between these covers and their borrowed wisdom. If the written word belonged to her parents, Sandra channels an experiential one: the impulse of life.
Hansen-Løve reunites with cinematographer Denis Lenoir who transforms the natural light of the Parisian summertime into a tactile backdrop to budding romance and approaching death alike. While Lenoir’s camera is nimble in the way it draws stairs, streets, and corners with slow pans and tracks, it’s never erratic nor impatient. In attending to these transitory spaces, Hansen-Løve imbues the in-between with a remedial quality in the moments when Sandra is framed alone. On these occasions, reverse tracking shots smoothly turn into pans as if the camera is just another passerby, enchanted by Sandra’s graceful gait, chin up no matter what. No wonder – Seydoux is once again marvellous and a collaboration such as this seems long overdue.
As tear imprints on Seydoux’s beatific face, we see hard cuts pair a difficult watch with a lighter one: care home conditions and a sea leopard story; talks about euthanasia with child’s play. Even if they clash tonally, having Sandra as the connecting tissue helps the film avoid the “woman-between-two-men” trope. Rather than simply mediating, Sandra is searching.
Yes, love blossoms as preparatory grief sets in, but this is time unfolding beyond coincidence and fate, it’s life itself. The wounds, the care, being a mother, a daughter, and a mistress are only parts of the complex puzzle, both her and all Mia Hansen-Løve protagonists are: flesh, blood, and soul.
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ANTICIPATION.
What could possibly outdo Bergman Island? 3
ENJOYMENT.
Bittersweet, throbbing realism. 4
IN RETROSPECT.
Hansen-Løve and Seydoux make a dream-team. More please! 5
Directed by
Mia Hansen-Løve
Starring
Léa Seydoux, Melvil Poupaud, Pascal Greggory
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