Some actors relish the act of performance in delightfully showy and externalized ways. Their brio provokes our enjoyment, and while all sorts of subtle and humanizing details may come from that delight in sheer invention, the work is big. Juicy. Like a peach, picked and then devoured by Cate Blanchett and Daniel Day-Lewis.
With Léa Seydoux, one of France’s very best, it’s another story. She operates with calm precision, and with the singular, unblinking eyes of a unique screen paradox: a guarded seeker. She’s also beautiful, but she’s too busy doing her job — listening, watching, feeling, interpreting a moment, or a flicker of emotion — to get hung up on her looks, or to confine her characters to beauty that is only skin-deep.
"One Fine Morning” brings out all these qualities in Seydoux, and writer-director Mia Hansen-Love works in strikingly similar, no-nonsense fashion. It is a story of a woman handling difficult family matters amid a discreet but soul-awakening affair with a married man.
