Cogent thought does not come easily to someone suffering from a neurodegenerative disease, but unexpected poetry can happen. A former philosophy professor quietly drifting away from present tense living, Georg (Greggory) struggles to articulate himself to his adult daughter Sandra (Seydoux). “It’s a bit difficult at times…” Georg starts, before landing on the source of his difficulty: “Living.”
One Fine Morning is not predominantly about Georg’s plight, though it is beautifully performed and sensitively dramatized. (Writer/director Mia Hansen-Løve has said the film was inspired by her own father’s illness.) The focus instead is on daughter Sandra, a translator in Paris and widowed mother to a young child. The film in its way is an itemizing – matter-of-fact, unsentimental, and terribly moving – of the difficulties Sandra faces everyday with grace. There is how to manage her father’s transition into assisted living; he will cycle through four care homes over the course of the film. There is how to raise a daughter (Le Picard) in the city on limited means. There is how to navigate a new relationship when the man in question – Clément (Poupaud), a scientist and friend of her late husband – is still married.
Admirers of Hansen-Løve’s previous film, her English-language debut Bergman Island, may be surprised at how straightforward One Fine Morning is, how resistant it is to delivering a capital-letter Cinematic Moment. There’s no equivalent here to Mia Wasikowska’s dance to “The Winner Takes It All” – a heart-clenching collision of desire and despair and dawning understanding – and that’s rather the point. Sandra is nowhere near catharsis. Who has the time for that?
In inferior material – for instance, a couple of pretty lousy Bond films – Seydoux can present as somewhat low-energy. Here, her preternatural stillness makes sense: You feel the heaviness of her stresses. You also feel her regular joy in the mundanities of raising a kid and spending time with a new lover. If this all sounds a little anti-dramatic, then that too is the point. That’s living.
This article appears in March 24 • 2023.