Near the beginning and the end of "One Fine Morning," Mia Hansen-Love's lucid, affecting and radiantly intelligent new movie, Sandra (Léa Seydoux) drops by to see her father, Georg (Pascal Greggory). The months separating these two visits — though there have been many other visits in between — have aged them both, Georg more visibly. Already disoriented by his small Paris apartment in the early scenes, due to a neurological illness that is fast claiming his sight and his memory, he is, by the end, ever less certain of his surroundings or even the identities of his visitors. You see the passage of time in his distant gaze and slow-shuffling gait, and you also see it when Sandra, normally a steady, calming presence, steps aside and begins to cry.
Rest assured that I've given away nothing, and that I doubt there's a more spoiler-proof movie — or a more graceful, moving one — arriving in theaters this week. As with a lot of films set to the pulse of ordinary life, you get the sense that this one could have ended a few beats sooner or, preferably, later. Hansen-Love, who wrote as well as directed, doesn't measure her stories in terms of conventional narrative progress. She knows that real-life drama is often incremental, and that it takes shape through repetitions, variations, complications both major and minor. What happens to her characters — a visit, a meltdown, a setback, a breakthrough — is seldom happening to them for the first or last time.
And so for much of "One Fine Morning," we are following Sandra, a widowed mother and freelance interpreter, through a familiar routine: checking in on her father, translating speeches and conversations for work, and picking up her young daughter, Linn (Camille Leban Martins), from school. Even when Sandra has a fateful run-in with Clément (Melvil Poupaud), an old friend who's unhappily married with a kid of his own, their immediate spark and easy conversational flow suggest the latest piece in a mosaic they've been building for a while.
