Between her job as a French-English interpreter, the prospect of romantic fulfillment, and the impending deterioration of her father’s health, the woman holding together all the threads in Mia Hansen-Løve’s “One Fine Morning” navigates a wide spectrum of human emotion. In the director’s follow up to last year’s English-language meta homage “Bergman Island,” Sandra (Léa Seydoux) oscillates between desire and grief with believable fluidity.
Reminiscent of Hansen-Løve’s 2016 “Things to Come,” starring Isabelle Huppert, “One Fine Morning” plays like a layered portrait of a full life told in dramatically rich vignettes from the array of facets that comprise who she is at this moment: a widow, a mother to a young daughter, a sexually starved induvial in an affair with a married friend, and the daughter of a philosophy professor with a neurodegenerative illness who requires round-the-clock care.
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At first, Sandra’s translation duties with a group of American war veterans visiting France or how her eight-year-old child casually shares about a shooter’s drill at her elementary school in case of a terrorist attack seem to comment on the transnational bonds between the United States and the European nation—both of historical and current violence. Later, as other conflict around her develops, she finds difficulty concentrating on floating between both languages, seemingly pointing to the perils of existing in liminal spaces.
Populated with a handful of fleshed-out supporting characters—most notably her sharp-tongued stepmother (Nicole Garcia) and her coupled scientist boyfriend Clement (Melvil Poupaud)—the situations Sandra undergoes project great intimacy. There’s a lived-in richness to the interactions that, even without much context on who these people once were and who they became, convince us their flaws are grounded on recognizable truth.
But though she finds grace in the mundane, Hansen-Løve doesn’t dwell long on any one moment. The sequence of events marches on without much respite or idle contemplation. Once an exchange between lovers or family members has run its natural course, a blunt cut transports us into a new setting forward in time. It’s as if the aim was to highlight the volatility of human tribulations. For better or worse, everything, especially life itself, is temporary.
In turn, Denis Lenoir, Hansen-Løve’s recurrent cinematographer, instills a humble elegance to the slice-of-life drama. Post-coital naked bodies framed in positions that call to mind classical paintings rather than explicit crudeness give the sexual encounters an aura of dreaminess and not of mere carnal relief. When Sandra walks the streets of Paris, Lenoir procures a comforting warmth to the images within its mostly verité aesthetic. Only once a drop of magical realism, a brief dream based on story Clement told her, enters the frame.
No one needs further confirmation that Seydoux is steadfast among the world’s most consistently compelling performers across challenging art house fare (“France”) and the occasional multiplex-friendly flicks (“No Time to Die”). “One Fine Morning” is then more of a reminder of her versatility and her for fined-tuned, unassuming acting.
As Sandra, Seydoux puts forward a delicately incandescent performance portraying someone in an unstable state, whose conflicting emotions about what she can’t change overwhelm her. She cries in distress over seeing her father fade away or with rage toward the man she loves but who is unable to commit to her. Yet, while in this storm, she must still conceal for the sake of her daughter. In touch with her inner whirlwind, she cries in silence away from others.
Everything about Sandra’s circumstances appears commonplace on the surface but is Hansen-Løve’s interest in juxtaposition and contrast that these gain dramatic prowess. For example, Poupaud’s gentlemanly charming Clement is himself indecisive about whether to protect the status quo or follow what could be just a passionate fling. Meanwhile, Sandra remains uncertain about whether her father’s memory is completely gone given that he doesn’t remember her, but still clings to his most recent romantic partner with profound affection.
When not in her torrid rendezvous with Clement, Sandra finds herself in a more somber mode, occupied with spending time with his ill father, barely responsive now, or preparing for the worst by parting with objects that gave meaning to a life, that materialize someone’s personality after they are gone or are no longer themselves, in this case, his books.
In that regard, Hansen-Løve’s latest converses with Gaspar Noé’s “Vortex,” an expectedly bleaker examination of old age, centered on an elderly woman with dementia. In that film, the verdict points to the insignificance of what we leave behind, but here, Sandra finds solace in their physicality. Both narratives, in their respective tones, treasure life in the here and now and not in what could have been or could be.
For their perpetual ambivalence, parts of “One Fine Morning” can make it feel meandering and repetitive, especially since Hansen-Løve has created a deliberately inconclusive story on all fronts. Neither full catharsis nor “happily ever after” are within reach. Still, the vivid poignancy it invokes along the way, the parts rather than the sum, renders it engrossing.
Hansen-Løve’s latest, best described as bittersweetly breezy, is a film about the impermanence of what we love, but also of what burdens us. One fine morning it can all go straight to hell or turn around for the better. [B+]
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