Adulting 101
Incroyable! A film about a woman doing not much and then having an affair is one of the year’s best? Yup.
One Fine Morning
Director: Mia Hansen-Løve • Writer: Mia Hansen-Løve
Starring: Léa Seydoux, Melvil Poupaud, Pascal Greggory, Nicole Garcia
France / Germany • 1hr 43mins
Opens Hong Kong September 21 • IIB
Grade: B+
In One Fine Morning (Un beau matin), translator, single mother and widow Sandra Kienzler (please let’s stop calling her Bond Girl, Léa Seydoux) hauls herself out of bed every morning to get her daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins) to school. Her translation/interpretation work is fairly flexible, so she can also brave the Paris metro and see her father, Georg (Pascal Greggory) a few times each week. He’s a renowned writer, critic and professor, with a library full of nearly priceless books, and unfortunately he’s gone blind and is showing signs of dementia. Sandra, her sister, Elodie (Sarah Le Picard), their mother Françoise (Nicole Garcia) and Georg’s current partner Leïla (Fejria Deliba) debate what the next step in his care is, eventually agreeing the time has come to move him into a care home. But where? What can they all afford? They try one facility, then another. It takes time, and so we see Sandra repeat this pattern every day, again and again and again.
Her routine is interrupted when she runs into cosmochemist Clément (Melvil Poupaud), an old friend of her dead husband’s and the spark that wakes up Sandra’s slumbering libido. A fling with this married man turns into a more serious affair and shakes up Sandra’s life. They break up. And reunite. She finds a home for her dad. A year passes. The end.
Oh, gurl…
And here’s the thing. Screaming, and throwing things, and wailing, and creating drama are great for reality television but ironically, those are not realistic. Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve, probably best known now for the vaguely experimental Bergman Island, has grounded One Fine Morning in such banal, recognisable ordinariness the drama all but writes itself. You know what this is? It’s the Gallic drama version of The Martian’s competency porn. And it’s amazingly refreshing to watch adults adulting.
Hansen-Løve has written a clutch of characters that are thorny, weak, smart, reasonable, unsure, horny, lonely, frustrated, tantrum-prone, manipulative, logical, romantic… In other words, complete characters that have such a frisson of realism it’s hard to not feel like you’re spying sometimes. Sure, Françoise and Georg are divorced, but they’re also in their 70s, and they have children with children. They’re too mature to act like petulant divorcés. Sure, Clément waffles back and forth between two women so often you may want to smack him, but he’s not a bad guy. He’s just gripped by very adult, very human duelling instincts to not abandon his wife and son, and to let himself get carried away by the physical and intellectual pleasures offered by an old friend. He knows it’s wrong – but you probably did too when you stole a candy bar as a kid. Wrong, but exciting. Same goes for Sandra. Gurl, he’s married. But for a woman resigned to any kind of sex life being in the rear view before she’s 40, whose only regular cerebral engagement comes from a father with a failing mind and an elementary school student, well. To hell with his marriage, amirite?
And therein lies the rub in One Fine Morning. Hansen-Løve’s razor sharp observations of human nature – warts and all – is inherently dramatic. The film is the kind of low-key, non-judgemental observation of how we relate and move through life Past Lives wants to be, but with significantly more grace, wit and empathy. It helps that Seydoux practically carries the entire film on her shoulders; this is a career-best performance (so far) from a woman who came out firing in Blue is the Warmest Colour, makes you forget how irritating Wes Anderson is, and slayed in Spectre. Spectre! Which was hot garbage. It’s a lived-in, weary performance that makes us understand and respect the currents running beneath Sandra’s surface. You don’t have to like them, just get them, and when she comes back to life, it feels triumphant.
Seydoux gets back-up from Poupaud (François Ozon’s Time to Leave and By the Grace of God), who makes Clément exasperating, yes, but never sordid or loathsome, practically dancing on the fine line between the two quite effortlessly. And Garcia (Netflix’s Lupin, the 1981 epic musical Les Uns et les Autres) is always a welcome presence, and here she provides a bit of levity as Georg’s whisky-and-cigarette voiced revolutionary-leaning ex. She’s funny, yes, but also – hold on to your shorts – a grown-ass woman who proves it’s possible to move beyond romantic errors. Gorgeously but comfortably shot on film, Denis Lenoir makes the four seasons (and so forward momentum) almost tactile. Hansen-Løve cleaves closely to what she does well, that being low-simmering, emotional, feminine explorations of sex and desire, ageing, intellectual engagement, mortality and loss; check out Isabelle Huppert in Things to Come for proof. But the picaresque One Fine Morning is arguably her most accessible film, with her most accessible lead. More Seydoux, please. — DEK