Mia Hansen-Løve’s follow-up to 2021’s Bergman Island is a simple but emotional character piece that ruminates on relationships and on the difficulties inherent in appreciating life as it comes. One Fine Morning (Un beau matin) unfolds quietly, made up of weighty moments that speak to the challenges of everyday life and the importance of acknowledging joy, love and connection.
Léa Seydoux stars as Sandra, a young but widowed mother whose days are divided between her job as a translator, parenting her eight-year-old daughter, and caring for her ill father (Pascal Gregory). Her life is spent in the service of others, with very little time for herself and her needs. That all changes when she encounters an old friend of her late husband, the charming cosmo-chemist Clément (Melvil Poupaud), and embarks on an affair full of everything her life had been lacking: love, longing and spontaneity. Her joy in the situation is apparent; the freedom of making a decision to feed her own soul and to reaffirm her worth as more than just a mother and a daughter lights her from within. But as her father’s neurodegenerative disease worsens, and her relationship becomes more complicated, it becomes harder and harder for Sandra to put on a brave face.
Hansen-Løve keeps the film grounded in reality from the get-go, preventing the narrative from ever crossing over into the melodramatic. She’s assisted greatly along the way by her superb cast, which also includes a stellar Nicole Garcia as Sandra’s practical but emotionally distant mother, but particularly by Seydoux. The actress’s riveting central performance elevates each and every moment, and the camera perfectly captures her spectacular range of emotions in the smallest gestures and expressions. It’s impossible not to connect with her situation–whether you’ve shared her experiences with parental care, motherhood or love or not. Seydoux and Poupaud’s chemistry simmers throughout and it’s easy to see how these two characters are inexorably drawn to each other.
Amid the deeply emotional beats, there are plenty of stark reminders of the myriad external obstacles that make modern life so very challenging for so many. The high cost of urban living–in this case, Paris–is demonstrated again and again as the camera ekes out space in Sandra’s apartment, which barely contains both mother and daughter. Then there’s the skyrocketing expenses of aging and of elder care. Some of the heaviest scenes of the film involve a grounded look at the differences in levels of care based on what you can afford and in watching the family make the best of awful situations. It’s heartbreakingly universal and hard to watch knowing that this is an area that is getting worse and not better. These reminders ground the film, allowing audiences to feel as much in the moment as the characters on the screen.
That’s not to say the film is without its lighter moments. There are fantastic moments of humour–from typically sullen pre-teen complaints, to familial banter that nails the snark that families build through year’s of closeness. You believe that these people have grown together, are comfortable with one another and have developed a type of honesty that’s hard won.
Through all of its emotional ups and downs, One Fine Morning’s central message is one of hope. Of perseverance and of gaining joy from all that life has to offer. Given the critical acclaim of Hansen-Løve’s last big-screen effort, it’s unsurprising that critical and audience expectations were high for her next effort but this lyrical, beautiful film lives up to them entirely.
One Fine Morning screened as part of TIFF 2022, which ran from September 8 to 18.
It opens in theatres February 10, 2023.