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”.
The irony of being intimately connected while desperately lonely can be a hard one to digest. Yet director Mia Hansen-Løve prods at the concept with the same tenderness that she applies to all her films – each of them united by the pains and pleasures of interconnectivity, whether it be a woman haunted by a romance from her youth (2011’s Goodbye, First Love), or a filmmaker whose artistic outlook begins to clash with that of her husband’s (2021’s Bergman Island).
But Hansen-Løve’s work could never be called sentimental. It’s too firmly rooted in reality for any whimsy, too tied to the confines of a world where emotions can only stray so far. Seydoux is unfussy in her mannerisms, but has a dreaminess to her look – often exploited for femme fatale roles – that seems to imply a certain guardedness. You get the feeling that Sandra is still trying to preserve some sense of herself. There are text messages left written but unsent, strained smiles that collapse into wordless tears.
Clément is a cosmo-chemist, who spends his days studying extraterrestrial matter that’s fallen from the heavens. But despite being exposed to the limitlessness of the universe, Hansen-Løve’s characters instead find themselves drawn to the philosophical power of ordinary objects and gestures – how a person’s identity can be mapped out by their book collection, or how a young girl’s psychosomatic limp can express the entirety of her sorrow. One Fine Morning is a film in which nothing is overstated, but everything is understood. Sometimes, it’s really as straightforward as the words Sandra’s grandmother casually lets slip: “It’s a bit difficult at times, living.”
Dir: Mia Hansen-Løve. Starring: Léa Seydoux, Pascal Greggory, Melvil Poupaud, Nicole Garcia, Fejria Deliba, Camille Leban Martins, Sarah Le Picard, Pierre Meunier. 15, 112 minutes.
‘One Fine Morning’ is in cinemas from 14 April, and streams on Mubi in the UK from 16 June
