One Fine Morning
Léa Seydoux gives the performance of her life in Mia Hansen-Løve’s romantic drama set in Paris.
Léa Seydoux and Camille Leban Martins
Until the last ten minutes or so, Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest work as writer/director finds her on her very best form. Furthermore, One Fine Morning is a film in which Léa Seydoux gives what is surely her finest performance to date. Indeed, the let-down at the end comes as a real shock because up to that point it had seemed likely that this piece would be Hansen-Løve’s best yet.
The tone of the storytelling plays a major role here with the storyline handled in a totally naturalistic way that deliberately avoids any sense of melodrama while suggesting instead the world of everyday living. It's an approach which immediately brings to mind the style adopted by Ozu in his classic family tales. Just how far-reaching the example of that great Japanese filmmaker has been has already been illustrated in France by the fact that Hansen-Løve’s compatriot Claire Denis openly acknowledged his influence when she made her Paris-set film 35 Shots of Rum in 2008.
The opening section of One Fine Morning establishes a sense of day-to-day life rather than suggesting the start of a plot-line, but it does introduce us to the film’s central characters. We meet Sandra (Seydoux’s role) when she is calling on her father Georg (Pascal Greggory), a former professor of philosophy who has been struck down by a neurodegenerative disease which has already drastically limited his sight and is affecting his memory and his ability to live in his Paris home. A hospital or a care home beckons imminently. Sandra's mother, Françoise (Nicole Garcia), who has remarried since divorcing Georg two decades earlier, remains concerned, as does Sandra’s sister Elodie (Sarah Le Picard). If Sandra is the one closest to her father, she also has her own life to live as a translator and, having been widowed young, is involved in bringing up on her own her eight-year-old daughter, Linn (Camille Leban Martins). Although Sandra’s father has a lover of his own, Leila (Fejra Deliba), Sandra herself has been unattached since the death of her husband some five years earlier, but now she meets an old acquaintance, Clément (Melvil Poupard) and a rapport grows up between them. He is a married man with a young son, but the marriage is less than happy and Sandra and Clément let themselves become involved in a relationship that is deeply felt yet clearly hampered by Clément being a husband and a father.
Although the first scenes in the film make the characters feel very real, one wonders initially if Hansen-Løve is echoing Ozu’s realism without fully grasping his ability to ensure that every scene has a structural function despite seeming on the surface as casual as everyday human life. But before long any doubts on that score fall away and there are two reasons for that. One lies in the fact that the relationship between Sandra and Clément grows so persuasively thanks both to the writing and to the acting with Seydoux and Poupard exuding a wonderful sense of chemistry. The other key to the film’s success is that as it proceeds we recognise more and more how it gains in structural cohesion through our being invited to compare the two central elements present in the tale. On the one hand there is the fading away of Georg and its impact on Sandra and on the others in the family. Certain scenes here bring to mind the recent Alan Bennett adaptation Allelujah but are presented in greater depth. Greggory never allows his performance to become maudlin but this side of the tale is inevitably downbeat being centred on impending death. However, Hansen-Løve sets that against the love between Sandra and Clément which may have its heartaches as well as its pleasures but which nevertheless comes across as being the very essence of being alive (it’s not at all inappropriate here to think of the message in the song of that name in the Stephen Sondheim musical Company).
The juxtaposition works wonderfully enhanced as it is by what Seydoux and Poupard bring to their roles. It is so vividly handled that only late on does it become apparent that, while the father/daughter relationship was born of the actual experience of Hansen-Løve who recently lost her father, the situation involving Sandra and Clément is not one that readily yields an effective conclusion. In the event it suddenly looks as though very late on One Fine Morning is starting to drift (there’s a family Christmas scene that seems to lack any purpose). But it is more alarming still when, just after that, the film jumps forward to offer a resolution that is presented without any of the detail that would make it convincing. Finally, on top of this, when the end credits roll, we find that they are accompanied by a sentimental song performed in English, the kind of thing that you might well expect to wind up a movie offering a conventional commercial love story. In these final scenes a potential masterpiece slips away from us sadly reducing the film’s impact. But it can't destroy the exceptional quality found earlier and in particular Léa Seydoux’s performance which just cries out to be seen.
Original title: Un beau matin.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Léa Seydoux, Pascal Greggory, Melvil Poupard, Nicole Garcia, Camille Leban Martins, Sarah Le Picard, Pierre Meunier, Fejra Deliba, Jacqueline Hansen-Løve, Catherine Vinatier, Samuel Achache.
Dir Mia Hansen Løve, Pro Philippe Martin, Gerhard Meixner, Roman Paul and David Thion, Screenplay Mia Hansen-Løve, Ph Denis Lenoir, Pro Des Mila Preli, Ed Marion Monnier, Costumes Judith de Luze.
Les Films Pelléas/Mubi/Razor Film Produktion/Arte France Cinéma/Dauphin Films/CN6 Productions/Canal+/Ciné+-Mubi.
112 mins. France/UK/Germany. 2022. UK Rel: 14 April 2023. Cert. 15.
