One Fine Morning

Festival favourite Mia Hansen-Løve returns with this profoundly resonant chronicle of a woman swept up in her obligations as a mother, daughter, worker, and lover. Anchored by Léa Seydoux’s richly layered performance, One Fine Morning illuminates the wonder and the turbulence of everyday life.

Sandra (Seydoux) spends her days working as a freelance translator, being an attentive single mother to her eight-year-old daughter (Camille Leban Martins), and caring for her father (Pascal Greggory), a retired philosophy professor slowly losing his sight, memory, and independence to a neurodegenerative disorder. In everything she does, Sandra is bright, patient, energetic — and utterly exhausted. Despite her beauty and charisma, she cannot help but feel her love life is behind her, until she runs into her old friend Clément (Melvil Poupaud), a cosmochemist with a son he adores and a marriage that he fears may be losing its spark. Sandra and Clément become lovers. Their time together seems blissful and easy, even as every other aspect of their affair feels frustratingly complicated and filled with heartache.

The captivating elegance of Hansen-Løve’s approach arises from the trust she places in her fully developed characters and her refusal to infuse any one event in their lives with artificial drama. Seydoux — that rare French star who shifts smoothly between Hollywood blockbusters (the James Bond franchise), daring international works (The Lobster, Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future), and the finest French cinema — is stunningly realistic in bringing this to life. Sandra faces myriad challenges throughout One Fine Morning, none of which offer any tidy closure. Rather, as she struggles to be present for each moment of pain or joy, we recognize her emotional journey and take heart in knowing that she’ll weather each episode with ordinary courage.

JANE SCHOETTLE