One Fine Morning

Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

Running time: 1hr52 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Melvil Poupaud and Léa Seydoux star in One Fine Morning

Fiction, even realist fiction, requires simplification. Human lives are far too complicated, and full of far too much incidental detail, for fiction that attempts to record everything to possibly work. Not to imply that all fiction is aiming for realism, of course. But when the goal is to immerse us in a plausible, realistic world where we can forget we’re watching actors and feel caught up in the detail of people’s lives, the necessary simplification required by fiction is too often taken too far. Say a film is about a relationship: too often, the rest of the character’s life recedes into the background as if this person is their love life, with barely-there supporting players mere props in the central drama.

The thing I liked best about Mia Hansen-Løve’s film One Fine Morning is that the temptation to over-simplify has been resisted where possible, though not to the extent of getting bogged down in the detail. If there is a lead story, it’s Lea Seydoux’s character Sandra coping with the degenerative disorder her father (Pascal Greggory) is facing. But she’s situated in a believable tangle of human relationships. There’s her mother (Nicole Garcia), a spiky, likeable presence, divorced from Sandra’s father twenty years ago. Her daughter (Camille Leban Martins), whose father passed away about five years ago. There’s her intense romantic affair with a friend who is already in a relationship (Melvil Poupaud). There’s her work as a translator.

Hansen-Løve captures that sense that although a tragedy is unfolding in slow motion, life refuses to stop. That the time allotted to said tragedy must still compete with other pressures in the busy, ongoing tapestry of life as it is lived is what gives the film some semblance of the gentle brutality of reality, rather than the sometimes artificial feel of fiction dealing with this kind of subject matter. The stark fact that a tragedy is not necessarily all-consuming can weigh us down with guilt — how can I contemplate a love affair at a time like this? The fact is, life doesn’t stop, and this is a film that understands this well.

ONE FINE MORNING (Un Beau Matin) (2022) Written by Mia Hansen-Løve | Shot by Denis Lenoir | Edited by Marion Monnier