One Fine Morning: Mia Hansen-Løve's latest sets Léa Seydoux as wallflower mom giddy for romance
Seydoux's lovelorn single mom anchors this autobiographical drama transitioning a declining parent while engaging in a frothy romance.
One Fine Morning France, UK, Germany, 2022, 112 mins | Drama, Romance | Starring Léa Seydoux, Pascal Greggory, Melvil Poupaud | Writer/Dir. Mia Hansen-Løve | Prod. Co.: Les Films Pelléas | Dist.: Sony Pictures Classics
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One Fine Morning is a film that sifts emotion from life’s prosaic events. Apparently, even in Paris, France, one’s joie de vivre can get sapped by the mundane. The film is scaffolded on Léa Seydoux’s beauty, vulnerability, and presence while de-frocking her as an everyday working mom sans romance in the city of love. Dodging the big screen glamour seen in Bond films, Seydoux’s tender performance accesses deep vulnerability, providing a balm of connection to the viewer. It’s like a Woody Allen film examining family, love, and relationships, but instead of jokes, it delivers emotional presence, and in the place of a pat mystery, it delves into parental decline.
As in Allen’s seminal stories, a romantic setting often plays a main character along with its stars. Here the streets, museums, and apartments of Paris support the frothy romance at the film’s core. Unlike Allen, however, Hansen-Løve avoids complete gaussian blur by staying clear of evident production design and honey-kissed cinematography. She pursues instead a hyper naturalism, unblemished by craft which invites into the story, through a sober lens, the realities of human mortality and its genuine attendant emotions presenting life unadorned.
French auteur Mia Hansen-Løve has built up a resume of autobiographical films. Her last, Bergman Island, centered on a screenwriting couple making a pilgrimage to Ingmar Bergman’s famous Fårö Island, which took its oxygen from Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, and Mia Wasikowska. In her latest, the French beauty Léa Seydoux enters into the frame as a freelance translator and permanent “before” image of mom jeans and sweaters who will not meet her Prince Charming, nor attend a fancy ball, but instead, will cozy up to a dallying married guy, with an approach that is, by most standards, nonchalant.
Through all of this, she will also never miss a day’s work or a parental chore as a single mom. Not all superheroes, it would seem, wear spandex and fight crime. Some are unsung working moms who’ve given up on romantic love. Nor will she get a make-over, contrary to a princess narrative, because she’s content as a de-sexualized bohemian—except when she wants to keep her guy in bed all day. Then she’ll rival a Modigliani reclining nude. Thank you very much—and you’re welcome. Apparently, women protagonists can have it all in any way they choose, even if it means destroying another woman's marriage, so long as that other woman stays off-screen so as not to prickle us with too much reality.
We soon learn Sandra has been widowed for some five years, raising her eight-year-old daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins) independently. However, the movie makes it uncouth to pry. Neither she nor even her daughter seems to carry a memory of her late husband and dad. And yet, his absence, we’re led to believe, sans evidence of any clinging to even a single memory, is the cause of her stalled momentum in love. Instead of that tension, we’re presented with the early onset declining dad narrative as her conflicting issue. Her father, Georg Kienzler, played with focus and commitment by Pascal Greggory, is losing his apartment and his job as a philosophy professor (an intellectual stand-in for the typical Allen trope of psychoanalysis) to Benson’s syndrome, a slow, creeping brain atrophy condition affecting vision, object permanence, and reading and writing. A definite mental decline affecting the sufferer’s identity. Surprisingly, this overblown subplot designed to tug at our heartstrings has little practical impact on Sandra’s parenting or her budding romance. With nursing home placements being a drag, and finding a suitable home for his philosophy books even more taxing, what she really needs is someone unexpected to come into her life and warm the sheets in her cozy apartment. Then, I’m sure, everything will work out just fine. No, really, I’m positive about it.
One fine morning, indeed, with her daughter in tow, Sandra runs into an old friend, the charming astrophysicist, or more accurately, cosmo chemist, Clément (Melvil Poupaud). His job title is a running gag in the film. The two hit it off and agree to catch up. He registers our shock as a viewer when Seydoux’s Sandra confesses to him to have not found another partner since her husband’s passing five years ago and proclaims she presumed that part of her life over. I guess Sandra must quietly suffer from a severe case of beauty dysmorphia when she looks in the mirror and sees the spitting image of Léa Seydoux staring back at her and wonders how she’ll ever find a guy. No doubt, the very reason the term “willing suspension of disbelief” was invented. Somehow Clément is the only lab nerd in Paris to set a flame under Seydoux’s frumpy jumpers. Suddenly, after one catch-up date, faded denim and loose-fitting tops are tossed to the floor, indulging the film’s only real hook, its un-complicated romance.
As someone saturated in English language, North American-centric (aka American) cinematic storytelling, I found much of One Fine Morning subverting my expectations. Unlike quintessential American films, the relationship between Sandra and Clément is not exploited for histrionics to play the blame game after the tinted glasses come off. Instead, there’s a sober approach here, with acceptance being the prevailing theme, which could be read as un-dramatic, leaving the film definable as a romance without bite or heat. Once Clément has had his fill of Sandra and realizes the real jeopardy he’s putting his family through by carrying on his affair, he confesses he can no longer continue. Instead of throwing a fit and laying on the guilt, Sandra acknowledges that she knew the situation going in and, with a quiet tearful expression, accepts that it must end. How very…Zen.
Clement quietly leaves, and Sandra’s life continues, returning to the attendant struggles of learning what it means to be a caregiver. The catch is, as sad as the film wants us to feel for Georg’s decline and Sandra’s loss of her father, his sickness is not mortally threatening. Instead, it’s a prolonged incremental decline, reducing the film’s emotional urgencies to that of moving house on a reality television show.
After Clément has returned to his wife, he messages Sandra sometime later, saying he can’t live without her and that she is all he thinks about. It’s the type of cliché that would typically cause an eye roll in an American film. You almost expect a following text from her bestie suggesting she should “ditch the deadbeat.” But alas, the film hasn’t given her one, so instead, she breathes in this standard bit of dating manipulation as genuine, allowing her emotions to surface yet again. Sandra never provokes Clement to test his love or pushes him into a decision. She loves him and takes it at face value. She remains available to him even as he enjoys the luxury of playing with her heart and testing out his options off-screen. The news of Clément’s re-upping his affections delivers a sumptuous visual of Seydoux’s alighted reflection, seen in the trailer romantically doubled in the bus’s window.
This low-key approach sits uneasily against the core principle of American storytelling: ramp up the stakes to its highest levels at every possible turn. I did find myself jonesing for more tension and didn’t feel entirely satisfied by the film’s low-key take at every turn by its end. There could have been more stakes with her daughter, who is the perfect kid, showing only admiration for Clément when he very immediately and fully enters their lives. Sure, she gets a leg cramp, but wow, talk about low stakes again. Sandra also feels no guilt for breaking up Clément’s family, which feels inherently selfish. Likewise, when it comes to her father, his ex-wife, of all people, seems to bear the most significant burden when it comes to looking after him, which I don’t imagine would be typical for many. Especially when he has an absentee girlfriend, Sandra, and her sister to look after him. This odd choice deflects responsibility from Sandra, allowing her to indulge in her inappropriate romantic liaison with a long-married college friend. As a result, much of the film’s story plays closer to a modern fairy tale, with Seydoux’s exquisite presence deflecting from life’s more complex realities—a bit more of the Woody Allen aesthetic creeping in through the story’s fabric. Indeed the film ends on a fairly cheesy freeze-frame insisting on romantic fulfillment.
However, this is not all bad news for the film. Despite its drawbacks of a low-stakes plot and wishful romantic thinking, or perhaps because of it, One Fine Morning is the sort of film you can hang out with as a companion. It can provide you solace as you navigate your own life’s ups and downs. To one degree or another, the events portrayed will visit us all at some point, be it an aging parent, the responsibilities of raising a child, or the gaining and losing of a lover. With Seydoux’s intimate performance, allowing full access to her deepest emotions, we gain an illusion of Seydoux, the humbled woman next door (not the untouchable glamourous movie star), as an imaginary cinematic companion who holds nothing back. She is as earnest as the day is long to employ an adage. This is the film’s greatest comfort. Presenting a genuine star from the cinematic firmament as just another soul among us with everyday human struggles is a compelling illusion: they’re just like us.
Seydoux’s ability to play the subtlest moments with incredible authenticity shows us unvarnished human emotion. When the first kiss happens between her and Clément, he plays a cruel game, insinuating that she wanted it first and that he was merely going for the door. I’m so sure. The married dude well beyond the proverbial seven-year itch suddenly finds himself with uncontested access to a beautiful woman worthy of an art gallery’s worth of relining nudes underneath those tomboy sweaters—and she’s the one desperate for a kiss. Okay. At any rate, he repeatedly teases her with this annoying bit of trifle, faking her out that she kissed him first, even as he quickly demonstrates the amount of vigor with which he would take her by slamming her up against the wall on his return kiss. Seydoux presents us with the most natural blush in response to Clément’s unfair assessment. The result for us as viewers is to form an immediate connection with the actress by her making the moment so perceptibly real. It’s almost as if we’re blushing with her.
Seydoux’s sublime ability demonstrates how available she is both for Hansen-love’s undercooked reality play and Clement’s manipulations. She does not protest against either but rides them both out. As such, we are absorbed into her work, much as life so often takes us for a ride whenever we encounter moments we’re less than fully in control of. Seydoux intoxicates us with her vulnerability.
Likewise, in a quiet moment off the top, when Seydoux is forced to pack up her father’s belonging to get him to his first nursing home, helplessness overcomes her face, breaking her façade with emotion. Or the moment played in the trailer of her father’s former student learning of his decline. Suddenly the realization of its significant implications lands, forcing her to hide her face and excuse herself. Seydoux is an actor’s actor, prizing her craft above her celebrity status, consistently dialing in her work scene to scene. She subtly carries the hurt of her father’s decline through each scene. Her happiness in moments with Clément or her daughter is weighted by the loss she is suffering in her heart. Seydoux’s bittersweet performance is the oxygen of this film. It lives and breathes on her every expression, welling eyes, and soulful visage, that emanates kindness, understanding, and undying friendship with deeply felt care. It’s an unadorned performance, giving naked access to her emotional core, which, you as it witness, can hold dearly as you transpose yourself into her proverbial shoes, sharing in her everyday journey as a mother, translator, daughter, friend, and yearning lover.
In further subversion of American cinema, writer/director Hansen-Løve does not follow the traditional arc of an ill health narrative. Sandra’s father continues to decline but only in micro-gradations. She doesn’t use his condition to build to an apex of grief. Instead, she deals with incremental loss, staying attuned to momentary shifts and what each new phase brings, and how it affects Sandra as she comes to learn what her new relationship is with the man she once held up as a paragon of thinking, who can now not even tell if her hair is long or short, or if her dress has patterns or is one solid color.
A particularly poignant scene of this incremental loss occurs midway through on a visit to her father at his latest nursing home. Sandra has brought along a selection of Georg’s CDs. She plays the one she knows to be his favorite: Schubert’s Sonata in “A major, D. 959." (Incidentally written during the last months of the composer’s life in 1828 and often understood as highly personal and autobiographical). Then, suddenly, the unexpected happens. Her father has lost his taste for the piece and requests something less complex. Greggory captures Benson’s Syndrome succinctly with understated grace. With his affecting work grounding us in every scene, Sandra is immediately dumbfounded by his unexpected choice.
These sudden adjustments cause Sandra to question how well she even knows her dad. While relocating her father's lifelong collection of philosophy books to a family friend’s, she tells her daughter Linn that his books make a more accurate portrait of the man than the shell he’s become. It’s striking that even as we live, facing our shrinking vitality, the items we work with may define us better than our living bodies do. Again, something seemingly quite un-American in sentiment. Identity is considered permanent and immutable. But perhaps, this moment is a deeper inkling of the distance between Sandra and her dad. She would rather be with his books than the man himself as he changes before her eyes. His books represent the man she has known all her life. The living man is a stranger.
One Fine Morning is a personal film from writer/director Mia Hansen-Løve. She appeared at the screening in a one-minute interview preceding the film, talking about writing this story from her own experiences dealing with a loved one degenerating before her eyes. As such, it’s understandable that the film treats its subject delicately, favoring to steer clear of darker territory. She states that she wanted to write the film while still going through the events, as they were fresh in her mind rather than waiting. This perhaps justifies the simplistic plot and her reluctance to test out more devastating events that would push our protagonist further were it a more plot-centric genre film.
On the strength of Seydoux’s performance, with its evocations around aging, One Fine Morning is an emotionally fulfilling watch as long as you’re willing to forego traditional narrative hooks. Despite my frustrations around the film’s low-key approach and its shortcuts to foreground romance, its ability to provide solace through life well observed is affecting. Existing on the exceptionally vulnerable performance of Seydoux, who manages to eschew her glamour and pass as a grounded woman next door, this film successfully emulates life. It’s helpful to keep in mind the aesthetic of the film as autobiographical, which seeks to hold a mirror up to life without refracting it. With that in mind, this film presents an antidote to overwrought storytelling.
Rating:
3.5/5
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