The woman at the centre of the subtle but cathartic One Fine Morning is cursed by her consciousness. Try as she might, she can’t escape the fact that she’s ultimately alone, trapped in her own head, and tied through her actions to each and every person around her. It’s a torturous existence. Sandra (Léa Seydoux), a young widow, cares for her eight-year-old daughter. She also cares for her father Georg (veteran actor Pascal Greggory), whose sight is mostly gone and whose memory is crumbling away due to a neurodegenerative disease. At work, as a translator, she patiently reinterprets the words of strangers, or guides American World War Two veterans back down the paths of their old traumas.
She has carved up and rationed out every last part of her heart. There’s no more left for her own use, as she’s forced to admit: “I just feel my love life is behind me.” Sandra finds her desires suddenly reawakened when a chance encounter with an old crush (Melvil Poupaud’s Clément) turns into a full-blown affair. But One Fine Morning doesn’t treat this exercise in self-care as simple or victorious in nature. Clément is married. He struggles to maintain the tryst, knowing how much pain it causes his wife and child. Every action creates its own ripples, and yet Sandra can’t help but relate to the words of her father when he describes his oncoming illness as a “sense of an abyss, of being outside of the world, away from others”.
