French director Mia Hansen-Løve has a knack for making unimpeachably delicate films about emotionally clobbering rites of passage. She has navigated death, divorce and traumatic adolescence with a softness that never quite turns to mush. Her most recent film, One Fine Morning – now available to stream on Mubi – takes the same approach to that strangest and most tender of life reversals, when children become their parents’ carers. Following a Parisian single mother (a never-better Léa Seydoux) as she reckons with the complications of steering her elderly, partially sighted father through the national care home system, from grappling with his dementia to redistributing his book collection, it’s quietly devastating, with pockets of warm humour and optimism.
Hansen-Løve has tackled the poignancy of parenting one’s parents before, with the passive-aggressive duet between Isabelle Huppert and the late Édith Scob among the highlights of her lovely 2016 film Things to Come (also on Mubi). Both films join a select canon of works on a subject audiences aren’t always eager to face. Some directors tackle it with overcompensating sentimentality, others with confrontational rawness. On the former end of the scale, look to sitcom creator Gary David Goldberg’s 1989 film-making debut Dad, one of a slew of laughter-through-the-tears, parent-child dramas that Hollywood dreamed up in the wake of Terms of Endearment. Starring Ted Danson as a brisk businessman reconnecting with his father (Jack Lemmon) as the latter’s health deteriorates, it’s glibly, even mechanically melodramatic, but Lemmon’s increasingly vulnerable performance gets to you anyway.
