Léa Seydoux was intoxicating long before she became a ‘Bond girl’. If you adored her character’s insouciance, sensitivity and sexual passion in Blue is the Warmest Colour, you’ll love what the 37-year-old actress does in this deceptively low-key French-language drama.
As Sandra – a Parisian working mum trying to care for her ailing father Georg (Pascal Greggory), while having an affair with married scientist Clement (Melvil Poupaud) – Seydoux often blushes, frequently sobs, and gives us many reasons to smile.
Director Mia Hansen-Løve (best known for Eden, Things to Come and Bergman Island) makes films that blur the line between fact and fiction. Her philosopher father had a degenerative disease, Benson’s syndrome, and died in a care home.
We see that care home, as well as reconstructions of grimmer abodes he was placed in before that (warning: these temporary non-havens will give you nightmares). And the surreal and fragmented words used by Georg have such an authentic ring. The former professor asks a question – he wants Sandra to help him feel better – and it all becomes so thematically and grammatically vague we can’t tell if he wants her to have sex with him or bump him off.
As a portrait of a daughter, slowly disengaging from a demanding and disorientated parent, One Fine Morning can’t compete with Florian Zeller’s The Father (it’s not as deep as Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation either). But all three films involve a woman’s right to be more than a carer, and plug us into the horrendous pain that comes with distancing yourself from someone who needs and deserves to be held.
More dramatic tension is supplied by the charming, tantalising “cosmo-chemist” Clement. Will he give Sandra strength or simply more grief? Back in 1996, playing an indecisive romantic in Eric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale, Poupaud flip-flopped, fabulously. He’s at it again, here, though with a very different outcome.
Sandra’s daughter, Linn (Camille Leban Martins) is ebullient and sulky in just the right way and the pair’s family life is well-captured. We see how mobile phones are central to the most organic activities (star gazing turns into screen gazing). We’re also invited to laugh at the way lust can derail a game of Scrabble.
This is a movie about emotions that are hard to spell out, made by someone who knows that angry/aggressive narratives receive more attention than quiet ones.
How amusing that the finale involves a widowed beauty climbing the many stairs to the Sacré-Coeur – the same scenario offered in the recently released and wildly successful blockbuster John Wick: Chapter Four, though handled slightly differently. Hansen-Løve’s goal is not to put a million derrières on seats. And, to put it mildly, she doesn’t do guns. Give her the chance, though, and she’ll blow you away.
112mins, cert 15
