Cinema Without Borders: Mia Hansen-Love’s One Fine Morning

French actress Lea Seydoux has had quite a formidable run in the last few years. After her breakthrough performance in Abdellatif Kechiche’s lesbian erotica Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013) and popular turns as the Bond girl Madeleine Swann in Spectre (2015) and No Time To Die (2021), Seydoux was striking in the titular role of an ambitious star TV journalist battling the side effects of fame in Bruno Dumont’s middling satire France (2021). She was as beguiling as the film itself, in David Cronenberg’s latest body horror, Crimes of the Future (2022). But it’s in Mia Hansen-Love’s Un beau matin (One Fine Morning, 2022) that one finds Seydoux at her most extraordinary as the ordinary Parisian Sandra.

Sandra is an Everywoman. A single mother raising an eight-year-old girl. A daughter taking care of an ailing professor father and desperately seeking a good nursing home for him, something his pension can’t quite pay for. A woman unexpectedly finding love in an old friendship. She is as strong as she is vulnerable, stoic as much as sensitive.

In the semi-autobiographical, naturalistic world of Hansen-Love there’s barely any drama propelling the narrative. Props like the volumes of books, records, snatches of a favourite piece of music and a notebook are the forces of life that also carry the weight of reminiscence integral to the film. Tension emerges from a door that a man suffering from neurodegenerative disease is unable to open, the inability to think that the man of ideas is fated to get afflicted with or a sudden rush of tears forced by the overwhelming burden of sadness that can embarrass you in front of a stranger.

Hansen-Lovebuilds One Fine Morning on the quotidian, the daily rhythms of any woman’s life in any corner of the world. It’s in the commonplace that one feels an uncommon affinity with Sandra. So many of us, like her, are whirling at that point in our lives when we are caught between twin, antithetical pulls—aging parents are the cause of our anxieties, fears and deepest of insecurities, and the young have demands of their own even while signalling hope for the future. Then there is the soothing, healing interlude of love that is also interrupted by the strife of its own. In trying to keep up with the relationships closest to her, lies Sandra’s struggle to find space, time, and allegiance for her own self. One Fine Morning dwells a lot on all of it without saying much at all. 

The biggest takeaway from the film is about how there can be no strict compartments in life. At any point in time, it is all about the compatibility of the incompatibles, simultaneity of the irreconcilables, and having the good and bad in equal measure. Happiness can unexpectedly break in through the clouds of gloom. Loss and longing, grief and desire can go hand in hand. The finality of mortality will co-exist with an essential continuity that underlines the circle of life. 

Hansen-Love and Seydoux collaborate in great harmony while plumbing the emotional depths of a seemingly unremarkable situation in life and take the audience along on a most affecting ride. I was fortunate to have caught One Fine Morning early one morning, in the company of Hansen-Love and Seydoux when it opened at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, a significant entry in my own notebook of memories. Hansen-Love spoke about how the film tells the story of “mourning for someone who is still alive”, a man getting deserted by his mind, disappearing as a soul but still “prisoner of his physical state”. Sandra must let go, overcome the guilt of abandoning all that’s dire in the most compelling bond of her life, and free herself to come alive for herself. In a nutshell, One Fine Morning is a journey into the heart of these inexpressible feelings.

French cinema has had an eventful 2022. For the Oscars, the country would have had to pick from, among others, Hansen-Love’s Labour of love, veteran Claire Denis’sStars at Noon, a sultry love story in the times of COVID and political turbulence, and Saint Omer, documentary filmmaker Alice Diop’s harrowing first feature about the trial of an immigrant mother accused of killing her child. That’s how you define the embarrassment of riches in cinema.