Mia Hansen-Løve puts a woman between a father who is leaving her slowly and a lover who cannot decide to stay, and watches without fuss. Seydoux is quietly superb, Greggory better still; the affair is the weaker half, but see it.
Mia Hansen-Løve makes films about people getting on with things, and One Fine Morning is the plainest of them. Sandra (Léa Seydoux) is a translator in Paris, widowed, with a young daughter and a father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), whose mind is being taken from him by a neurodegenerative disease. She visits him, argues with the family about where he should live, and somewhere in all this runs into Clément (Melvil Poupaud), an old friend with a wife, and goes to bed with him. That is the whole film. It is quiet and it is honest, and it is one of the best things Hansen-Løve has made.
Greggory is the reason it works. He plays Georg as a courteous man who knows something is wrong and has decided to be polite about it. There is a moment, early on, when he loses the thread of a sentence and, rather than panic, waits for it to come back. It did not come back. We had braced ourselves for the illness and not for the good manners, and it was the manners that got at us. Nicole Garcia and Sarah Le Picard, as Françoise and Elodie, share the visits and the arguments about care homes, and none of the three is allowed a speech.
Seydoux has the harder job, because Sandra is mostly holding herself together, and holding together is not much to act. She does it with the body rather than the face. She cries in the street, briefly, and then goes to collect her daughter. She sits in a booth turning other people’s words into French while her own life goes unspoken. When the affair starts she is startled by her own appetite, and Seydoux lets that show as something close to embarrassment. It is a performance of small adjustments, and we did not catch her making one of them.
Denis Lenoir shoots Paris in daylight, on pavements and in stairwells and small kitchens, with no interest in making it pretty. The light is the light there happened to be. Mila Preli’s production design gives Sandra a flat that is cramped and lived in, and gives the institutions Georg passes through corridors that all look the same, which is rather the point. Judith de Luze keeps Sandra in the same coat for most of the film; she has other things to think about than clothes, and we believe it. Marion Monnier cuts the way Hansen-Løve’s films are always cut, ending a scene the moment it has said what it needs to and starting the next one already underway, and there is hardly any music to tell us how to feel.
The affair is where the film is thinner. Poupaud is good, warm and a little cowardly, and the scenes in bed are frank without being showy; the 15 certificate is earned there and nowhere else. But Clément leaves, comes back, leaves again, and by the third time we had started to count. The scenes between them are the same scene, several times, and Hansen-Løve seems to know this and to have decided that is how affairs are. She is right, but it does not make the middle hour any tighter. Sandra’s daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins) is drawn more lightly than she might have been, and mostly stands in for what Sandra has to get home to.
Set against the director’s own work, this sits closer to Father of My Children and Things to Come than to Bergman Island: no artists talking about art, just a family dealing with a hospital. The story is drawn from her own life, and it shows in the details that nobody would invent, the forms, the waiting, the way grief has to fit around a school timetable. Most critics have been warm, and one or two have found it bleak. We did not. Sandra goes to the cinema, kisses someone she should not, and takes her father for a walk, and the film treats all three as reasons to keep going.
Watch it at home, on an evening when you are not expecting to be cheered up, and you may find you have been. At 112 minutes it is exactly as long as its year needs to be, and it does not end where you expect it to.
