Sophia Michaels
Life changes as it happens. Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning takes the various compartments of a woman’s life and allows them to act naturally, which is to say, to change: shifting, recurring and reflecting back on each other in ways that feel true to that life.
It’s a life situated in the everyday patterns of routine. Visits to an ailing father, who suffers from Benson’s syndrome, a degenerative neurological condition; and more visits to other relatives, including a mother (now divorced for over 20 years) and sister as they figure out how best to care for the ailing man for the foreseeable future. And even that care is not simple, a feat that involves moving the man from one hospital to the next, punctuating the entire movie. The woman in question, Sandra Kienzler (Léa Seydoux), is a translator by trade. She has one young daughter, Linn; the girl’s father has been dead for five years.
This is not the kind of film to make us wait long for the question of love to reenter Sandra’s life — and it arrives by way of a recurrence. By chance, she runs into a dear friend of her late husband, Clément (Melvil Poupaud), and they hit it off, their lives clicking together like compatible opposites. To her literary tastes, we meet his work as a scientist, a cosmo-chemist, specifically, charged with studying extraterrestrial dust. To her late husband, we have his ex-wife in the making, or at least, this is the plan. She has a daughter, he has a son. And in the grand scheme of things, they like and want each other very much, delving into a routine of constant sex that seems to surprise them both, and which has no downsides but for the inevitable problem of what this will mean for his family.
What is One Fine Morning about? To a great extent, it’s about problems like this — problems of the soul versus the body. At one point, Sandra sums it up plainly. This comes when she’s finally decided what to do with her literary, ex-professor father’s books after they’ve moved him into hospital care. Sandra’s visits to her father sometimes feel strained; for her kindness, and the kind of intelligent warmth at which Seydoux excels, she is nevertheless clearly flustered. Patient, but uncertain of what to do with this man who can barely see, who is prone to panic attacks, who — out of love — deserves patience, but who sometimes strains that patience. Giving some of the man’s books away, Sandra says, “His library is more him than the person in the hospital.” His soul is in the books, she says. The hospital merely claims the body.
One Fine Morning is yet more evidence of how far Mia Hansen-Løve can push her naturalistic style, using seemingly plain storytelling to advance intellectual ideas that rarely feel drawn from the mind because they are so in tune with felt experience: feelings and attractions, the passing of time, the sense of a life being lived. This movie is no different. Her affinity for well-patterned drama that reveals itself on its own time, in its own way, is on righteous display here. The interactions between Sandra and Clément and Sandra and her father (and mother) are rife with ideas, in part because Sandra is so full of them. She is figuring something out about her own nature. She is waking up to her fear, not only of losing her father, but of one day being lost in the way that he is lost. She is waking up, not just to a new love, but to the idea of wanting love again after having felt that she’d left such rituals behind. It’s no wonder the man who emerges back in her life is a man that she already knew. You sense that utter newness would not appeal to her. The get-to-know-you song-and-dance gets excised in favor of the kind of immediate intimacy to which Sandra naturally, immediately clings, in the way that you only could if you’d hungered for it.
It’s the kind of intimacy that’s under strain in her visits to her father — and this strain becomes something for Sandra to consider, and consider deeply. That’s what resounds, here: a sense of deep consideration, a life being understood as it’s being lived. One Fine Morning works because the basic drama of it inspires our own curiosity about Sandra and the modes of love she is exploring in her life. It satisfies because Hansen-Løve seems to share our curiosities. Watching Sandra live in her world, we’re also watching a director explore that world — gently, quietly, but with unmistakable hungers of the mind and soul, of her own.
