By Steve Erickson

One Fine Morning lives up to its sunny title, even if it’s a bit less optimistic than you might expect. 

One Fine Morning, directed by Mia Hansen-Løve. Screening at the Coolidge Corner Theatre starting February 10.

Pascal Greggory and Léa Seydoux in One Fine Morning. Photo: Les Films du Losange

Being stuck in a position where your life’s decisions are contingent on other people’s physical condition and mental whims can be terribly painful. Sandra (Léa Seydoux), the protagonist of Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning, finds herself in this kind of situation. Her father Georg (Pascal Greggory) suffers from a degenerative nerve disease which has destroyed his ability to think and perform basic life functions. This condition struck at a fairly early age: in real life, Greggory is 68, while the character’s 98-year-old mother makes an appearance and stresses that she does not want to be pitied. Features on the challenging lives of the elderly often take on a preachy or documentary edge, but One Fine Morning avoids falling into the traps of sentimentality or exploitation even as it benefits from the real aging of its actors.

Sandra works as an interpreter, translating German into French for business conferences and lectures. Already widowed, she takes care of her daughter Linn (Camlle Leban Martin). Georg is shuffled off into a nursing home, which means accepting compromises. She and her sisters have to find a private residence they can pay for; despite France’s universal health care, there would be at least a year-long wait to get Georg into a public facility. Sandra’s decision to send her father away, rather than take care of him herself, is never criticized by the film. Still, a scene in which a nurse tells Sandra that she takes care of her own elderly parents and their bathroom needs at home — in addition to guiding Georg to the toilet at work — hints at middle-class fears about the body. Meanwhile, Sandra dates Clément (Melvil Poupaud), a married man who has to sneak away from his wife to spend time with her.

Director Mia Hansen-Løve is interested in probing the ambiguities of love. The characters in One Fine Morning don’t have conventional marriages. They don’t necessarily live with the people who are the most important to them. At a certain point, Sandra realizes that Clément has become “friend and boyfriend.” Their relationship begins on a very physical note: she’s shown nude and in bed with him several times. Sexual excitement is not this liaison’s only motor, but it’s the main one. After they have become closer there is a complication: he refuses to leave his wife. While enjoying a picnic with Sandra in the park, he sees one of his spouse’s friends and panics. In a stereotypical French touch, Sandra comes to realize that she’s become Clément’s mistress. Their relationship becomes complicated, with many ups and downs, but they share an enduring passion.

Hansen-Løve’s previous movies are full of references to filmmaking and how it fits into her own life. Like many French directors, Hansen-Løve worked briefly as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma. Her second film, The Father of My Children, was inspired by the suicide of producer Humbert Balsan, who acted in Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac and frequently collaborated with Arab directors. Balsan had mentored Hansen-Løve, and his death prevented him from producing her first feature. 2021’s Bergman Island offered a glimpse into the life of a director working on a new script while staying in Faro, Sweden (where Ingmar Bergman had lived.) Yet its protagonist, while appreciating Bergman’s art, is rather critical of him as a person. She avoids fan-ready experiences, including taking a bus tour of Faro, as she struggles with a new screenplay and grows to realize that her boyfriend is a jerk. She begins to understand that filmmaking is a part of life — not valuable as a disinterested perspective on it. Writing about The Father of My Children in 2010, critic and director Dan Sallitt aptly stated that “it’s a sign of Hansen-Løve’s stature as an artist that she is as intrigued by the intricacies of Grégoire’s (the character based on Balsan) film business as by the dynamics of his family.”

While her movies have never thrown out film references in the manner of early ‘60s Jean-Luc Godard (or become as obsessive about the decline of cinema as his later films and videos), there is a self-conscious cinematic component to One Fine Morning. After Sandra takes her daughter to a movie in the mall, she says she liked the story but complains about the director’s violent and aggressive stylistic approach, especially for a children’s film. Her daughter does not get the point. Much later, Georg’s voice is synced to the image of a woman crying, seen on a movie screen glimpsed behind a ticket window booth.

References to Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis” play a major role. The book is shown on a shelf at Sandra’s home to prove her bona fides as a reader of German, sitting alongside Goethe and Hannah Arendt. Kafka’s fable comes up again when Sandra discovers an essay by her father, in which he also muses about the start of his decline at time he was still lucid enough to think and write well. This monologue’s placement — recited in voice-over by Greggory — stands outside the narrative’s chronology. This reference to Kafka’s story resonates splendidly in the context of a film that looks at a disease that leads to extreme deterioration. The tale’s central metaphor is as much about how transformation challenges our humanity as it is about the horrors of physical debilitation.

None of the cultural markers in Hansen-Løve’s work simply exist as reference points or Easter eggs. The life of an artist, with all its pains and tensions, is a subject she’s returned to again and again. She has also consistently sown references to her own family and acquaintances throughout her films. Eden is based on her brother Sven’s work as a house music DJ. Her cousin Igor acted in The Father of My Children. Both her father and mother were philosophy professors, and the decline of Georg was inspired directly by the last years of Hansen-Løve’s father’s life as he lost his mental faculties.

By this point, One Fine Morning might sound overbearingly grim and intense. It’s not. Indeed, the narrative lives up to its sunny title, even if it’s a bit less optimistic than you might expect. Denis Lenoir’s cinematography casts Paris in a digital pallor that still manages to let the sun in. The subplot about adultery transcends its limits as a conventional trope in French cinema: Sandra and Clément are trapped in a relationship they find rewarding but can’t embrace openly. The film ends before any of its protagonists reach a firm conclusion to their predicaments or escape a state of flux. If death and aging weigh over the film, so does the possibility of finding life workable, even happy, without needing it to be settled.

Steve Erickson writes about film and music for Gay City News, Slant Magazine, the Nashville Scene, Trouser Press, and other outlets. He also produces electronic music under the tag callinamagician. His latest album, The Bloodshot Eye of Horus, was released in November 2022, and is available to stream here.