One Fine Morning film review — Løve letter to Paris, French film and Léa Seydoux

France is getting old, but Paris still looks a knockout in spring. This is among the lessons of One Fine Morning, the button-bright new movie from Mia Hansen-Løve, with Léa Seydoux excellent as Sandra, a translator with a practical backpack and Jean Seberg’s haircut from Breathless. Her life is not uncomplicated, but the city she calls home is lovely to the point of parody. In endless sunshine, trees whisper and boating lakes glint. A trip to the Musée de l’Orangerie? Ice cream by the Seine? Mais oui!

Yet the French capital also backdrops sorrow. In a tender, intelligent film, everything has a dual role: mournful and playful, freighted and weightless.

The source of much of the heartache is Sandra’s father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), a former philosophy professor, now blind. Memories are all he has left of this picturebook Paris. But worse, memory itself is failing. He has Benson’s syndrome, a variant of Alzheimer’s that claims the sight. And so in an apartment still filled with light and books, Sandra brings quiche and conversation, visiting between single parenting her young daughter, whose own father died some years ago.

With films like Eden and Goodbye First Love, Hansen-Løve was doing movie autofiction before it had the name. Here she mines her own experience caring for her father, Ole Hansen-Løve, after his diagnosis with Benson’s syndrome. But the film is never a grind, and only sometimes tormented. Air is allowed into the grief. A delicate process.

Sandra lovingly tends to her father. He is also just one call on her attention amid a large ensemble of extended family. Seydoux gives the character twofoldedness: star charisma and sturdy pragmatism. It’s the kind people have to learn when they find themselves in Sandra’s position, sandwiched between children and dependent parents.

While also trying to live. If the film’s dreamy Paris can seem trope-ish, the same goes for Clément (Melvil Poupaud), the platonic friend with whom Sandra becomes entangled. A dashing “cosmo-chemist” often stationed in the Arctic, he straightfacedly offers to show her his mass spectrometer. The snag, naturally, is his wife.

What would French film do without married men? But again, Hansen-Løve makes novelty of the familiar. One Fine Morning is a high-end drama of the domestic, brought to life by Seydoux’s pinpoint authenticity. The same themes of change, churn and memory refract through a wider lens too. There are sly dabs of modern context: Sandra’s daughter skips happily out of a school-shooter drill; the gilets jaunes are evoked when Sandra’s mother Françoise (Nicole Garcia) joins a chaotic protest. (A portrait of Emmanuel Macron is manhandled.) People age, but here an entire way of middle-class Parisian life appears as a pretty bubble, and perhaps not impermanent.

The same could be said for the school of European arthouse cinema to which Hansen-Løve belongs. With that Seberg hairdo, Seydoux is a walking homage to film history, even before Georg nods to the Jean-Luc Godard line about every story needing a beginning, middle and end (but not necessarily in that order). Call it poetic coincidence that Godard died in 2022, the same year One Fine Morning was made. But then, the film embodies its own message: that every end is also a beginning, wherever you put the middle.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from April 14