A cerebral auteur who mostly paints in understated pastel shades, Mia Hansen-Løve took an enchanting stylistic detour last year with Bergman Island, stepping outside her usual bourgeois-bohemian Paris milieu for a lightly experimental, self-referential, English-language love letter to art-house cinema, romantic obsession and Nordic landscape. Less that a year later she is back in Cannes, and firmly back in her Parisian discomfort zone, with One Fine Morning, a far more conventional slice of semi-autobiographical domestic realism starring the current queen of French cinema, Léa Seydoux.
As with most of her work, Hansen-Løve delivers hints of magic and poetry here, but she also succumbs to navel-gazing banality in places. Premiering in the Un Certain Regard sidebar in Cannes, One Fine Morning feels like an unusually slight work even from a writer-director already best known for soft-spoken chamber dramas. Seydoux’s international fame will help boost commercial prospects, but this rarefied rumination on love and loss is unlikely to pull in James Bond-level audiences.
Seydoux plays Sandra, a thirty-something translator who shares a cramped Parisian apartment and a fairly joyless life with her pre-teen daughter. Noting in her Cannes press notes that Seydoux has recently been stereotyped in glamorous eye-candy roles, Hansen-Løve delights in casting her against type as a more dressed-down working mother, with functional gamine hair and minimal make-up. She remains a rare beauty, of course, but it is pleasing to see her working in a more realistic register, exploring more nuanced emotional terrain without having to dodge machine-gun fire in sparkly ballgowns. That said, fans of Seydoux’s signature edge-of-tears, lip-trembling, inner-anguish expression can rest assured that it gets multiple airings here. Mostly Magnum, but with hints of Blue Steel.
Outside her daily domestic routine, Sandra is also dealing with the failing health of her father Georg (Pascal Greggory), a retired philosophy professor whose vision and comprehension are slowly being eroded by Benson’s syndrome, a rare kind of dementia. With Georg increasingly unable to live independently, Sandra and her extended family must make the painful collective decision to move him into a nursing home, with all the emotional and financial stress that entails. Hanson-Løve says a key theme of One Fine Morning is “being in mourning for someone who’s still alive.”
Hanson-Løve has always mined her own personal and family history on screen, but One Fine Morning feels particularly autobiographical. The director admits she cast Greggory partly for his resemblance to her real father, himself a philosophy professor, whose death in similar circumstances informed her screenplay. Some of the film’s most poignant scenes were shot in real care homes for elderly citizens located across Paris, tender snapshots of fading lives leavened by small flashes of humour, compassion and music.
In a parallel plotline, while she stuggles to process her father’s harrowing decline, Sandra also reconnects with old friend Clément (Melvil Poupaud), a handsome cosmo-chemist (yes, that’s a real thing) who finds her single status baffling. “I just feel my love life is behind me”, she shrugs, with a teasing glint of Blue Steel. Clément is married, but also flirtatious. And quite hot. And French. You will never guess what happens next. Unless you happen to have seen any French films made in the last 70 years or so. Sure enough, before long, a lusty illicit affair blossoms into a full-blown romance, but Clément is torn between his new lover and his family-man commitments. “This was never just a fling for me,” Sandra chastises him tearfully.
Hansen-Løve is an avowed fan of Eric Rohmer, and there are discernible echoes of his low-voltage, conversational, Parisian promenades in One Fine Morning. Indeed, the casting of serial Rohmer collaborator Greggory is surely a winking cross-generational homage on some level. But there are uneasy hints of Woody Allen’s creaky late-period Euro-productions here too: all affectless ennui and casual infidelity, book-lined scruffy-chic apartments and obvious tourist landmarks, not to mention the ritual name-dropping of Kafka and Kierkegaard. This is cultured intellectualism used as lazy lifestyle signifier, not as a means of expanding or elevating the cinematic art fom.
Shot in a fairly prosaic, naturalistic manner, with a score of tastefully restrained dinner-party piano music, One Fine Morning is a film of low-key lyricism and genteel pleasures. No spoilers here, but Hansen-Løve sifts some embers of hope from the ashes of grief, steering these tortured souls towards a kind of redemptive resolution, ultimately suggesting that humans need to find a healing balance between death and rebirth, joy and despair. Which is a perfectly reasonable philosophy, but not necessarily one that makes for gripping or profound screen drama. Sometimes understatement is overrated.
Director, screenwriter: Mia Hansen-Løve
Cast: Léa Seydoux, Melvil Poupaud, Pascal Greggory, Nicole Garcia
Cinematography: Denis Lenoir
Editing: Marion Monnier
Producers: David Thion, Philippe Martin, Charlotte Dauphin
Production company: Les Films Pelléas (France)
World sales: Les Films du Losange
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
In French
112 minutes
