One Fine Morning: Film Review
Writer/director Mia Hansen-Løve is on quite a productive streak at the moment – her movie Bergman Island only came out in the U.K. 11 months ago and she’s already bringing out another feature, One Fine Morning.
This romantic drama stars Léa Seydoux as Sandra, a young widowed mother who has to juggle raising her eight-year-old daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins), her job as a translator/interpreter and caring for her father Georg (Pascal Greggory), who is suffering from a neurodegenerative disease. Sandra decides to complicate her life even further by embarking on an affair with Clément (Melvil Poupaud), her late husband’s friend, after they bump into each other at the park.
One Fine Morning is a compelling character study that examines a particularly difficult portion of Sandra’s life. The film follows her as she goes to work, looks after her daughter and visits her ailing father every day. She seems exhausted doing that on a daily basis yet she still manages to find time to do something for herself – and give in to her sexual desire for Clément. Good for her!
The situation with her father gets more and more taxing as they struggle to find a decent nursing home for him. Plus, her dalliance with Clément gets more and more serious and she falls in love with him, even though he’s reluctant to leave his wife. You want Sandra to find happiness and some peace in her life and thankfully it ends on a hopeful note (even if it felt rather abrupt).
Seydoux always delivers impressive performances and she doesn’t disappoint here. She carries the film with her grounded and raw and oftentimes emotional performance. Sandra has the weight of the world on her shoulders and is deeply tired from spinning so many plates at once.
One Fine Morning is a lovely study of family, loss and love, with a captivating lead performance from Seydoux.
In cinemas from Friday 14th April and on MUBI from 16th June