One Fine Morning
Un beau matin
Mia Hansen-Løve (2022)
Mia Hansen-Løve’s favoured modus operandi as a writer-director is well established. She takes someone or something important in her life and develops a screenplay around them, assuming that the power and resonance the material has for her personally will naturally pervade the resulting film. It doesn’t, of course. In the event she relies on the quality of her lead actors to animate and give (apparent) substance to her mediocre scripts: for example, Things to Come (2016), starring Isabelle Huppert, works a lot better than Eden (2014), starring someone who’s never been heard of since. The story of Eden was inspired by that of Hansen-Løve’s brother (who shared the screenplay credit with his sister). Huppert’s protagonist was, like Hansen-Løve’s mother, an academic who separated from her husband in late middle age. Now it’s the turn of Hansen-Løve’s father to play a key role – though not the main one. The first of two big differences between One Fine Morning and both Eden and Things to Come is that the central figure in this latest piece, set in present-day Paris, is an alter ego of Hansen-Løve herself: Sandra Kienzler, whose father, Georg, has an incurable neurodegenerative disorder. The second difference is that Hansen-Løve takes the view that the primary theme – Sandra’s struggle to come to terms with George’s dementia – hasn’t the legs to sustain a feature-length drama on its own: it has to Box and Cox with a romance that the heroine enters into. There’s remarkably little synergy between the film’s two halves.
We know that Sandra is the representative on screen of Mia Hansen-Løve because the latter has made clear in interviews about her new film that her own father suffered from posterior cortical atrophy, known as Benson’s syndrome[1], and that the later stages of his illness coincided with the start of his daughter’s relationship with Laurent Perreau, who subsequently fathered Mia’s second child. She already had a daughter, born in 2009, from her relationship with Olivier Assayas, which ended in 2017. In One Fine Morning Sandra (Léa Seydoux) is a single mother with an eight-year-old daughter, Linn (Camille Leban Martins). Georg Kienzler (Pascal Greggory) is, as Ole Hansen-Løve was, a professor of philosophy disabled by Benson’s syndrome. The set-up isn’t a carbon copy of the writer-director’s real-life situation. Sandra is an interpreter and a translator rather than a film-maker. Laurent Perreau also works in films but Clément (Melvil Poupaud), with whom Sandra falls in love, is a ‘cosmo-chemist’, who travels to the ends of the earth collecting extra-terrestrial dust for analysis (he invites Sandra up to his lab to see his meteorite samples). Sandra’s mother, Françoise (Nicole Garcia), is not another philosophy professor, like the Huppert character and Mia Hansen-Løve’s mother, but an apparently seasoned, though dilettante, political activist. But these adjustments hardly penetrate the central story – whereas the welter of publicity around its autobiographical connections helps create an illusion that the film is ‘true’ and (therefore) deeply felt.
The narrative holds attention – for audience members who share Hansen-Løve’s gruelling personal experience of watching a loved one lose their mind it may do far more than that. And although One Fine Morning doesn’t have an Isabelle Huppert to rely on, there are high-class people in the cast. Léa Seydoux plays the lead very ably even if she does little that’s unexpected. Sandra and her daughter get along famously yet Seydoux has a persistently melancholy air, which makes a kind of sense of the consensus in online plot synopses I’ve looked at since seeing the film that Sandra’s a widow, though if there’s explicit mention of this in the dialogue, I missed it. We do learn that she first knew Clément as a friend of her husband/partner: after Sandra and Clément bump into each other again by chance the mutual attraction between them builds inexorably. Clément is a husband and father; guilty feelings about abandoning his wife and son keep derailing his affair with Sandra. Melvil Poupaud conveys the man’s anxiety and ambivalence, as well as his charm, subtly but definitely. The plot looks to be shaping up to expose Clément as an exploitative rotter; it’s one of the film’s few surprises that he eventually commits to what appears to be a settled relationship with Sandra. Despite a lengthy filmography, I don’t recall seeing Pascal Greggory before (though I must have done, in La vie en rose (2007), if nothing else): he’s admirable as Georg (see more below). And Camille Leban Martins is splendid as eccentric, demanding Linn.
One Fine Morning moves along at an unvarying pace, as Hansen-Løve alternates between Sandra’s reactions to her father’s predicament and her unstable romance with Clément. The Georg scenes – which describe his being moved from his own apartment to a succession of hospitals and nursing homes – also often involve Françoise, even though Georg and she split twenty years ago; Sandra’s sister, Elodie (Sarah Le Picard); and Leïla (Fejriua Deliba), a middle-aged woman described rather cryptically as Georg’s ‘companion’ (they weren’t living together) and whose presence is the only one that consistently soothes him. There are some effective moments and details: Sandra’s discovery of a notebook in which her father records his thoughts (read in voiceover by Pascal Greggory) on the illness that’s gradually overtaking him; Linn’s attention-seeking limp; Sandra’s consolation in ensuring that much of her father’s library finds a good home with Esther (Elsa Guedj), a former student of his, and her family. Linn, though eager to help with the sorting out of books, is understandably puzzled when Sandra explains that she now feels her father more present in his library than in the person he’s become. In an enjoyable, funny scene on Christmas Eve, chez Françoise and her new partner (Pierre Meunier), Linn and Elodie’s two daughters (Esther Wajeman and Rose Wajeman) are banished to the next room while the grown-ups, led by Elodie and her husband (Samuel Achache), act out – with enthusiasm – a suitably audible flying visit from Santa Claus. The scene’s made all the better by the suspicion that Linn et al, excited as they are, know their parents and grandmother are only pretending to welcome Santa. These various highlights, though, register chiefly because they so markedly, and briefly, raise the film’s energy level.
Sandra’s father’s confusion, intensified by his loss of vision, doesn’t entail extreme behaviour: although that might be thought a relief for the viewer, Pascal Greggory interprets Georg’s mental state with such quiet conviction that he makes it, if anything, even more alarming. In other respects, the film’s handling of cognitive decline is problematic in the wrong way. I’m guessing that the minor elderly characters who occasionally wander into rooms that aren’t theirs are played by actors; when Hansen-Løve’s camera pans across a group of lost-looking faces in a nursing home, I suspect she’s showing the real (unconsenting) thing. On the other hand, and despite the actor’s fine work, Georg, handsome and nattily dressed, is the latest screen example of decorous dementia. This comes through most strongly in a scene where he urgently needs the toilet and Sandra goes to get a nurse. She doesn’t hurry to find one and the nurse takes her time going to Georg’s room; you fear the state he’ll be in when they get back there but Mia Hansen-Løve is oddly uninterested in the crisis from the patient’s point of view. Instead, the nurse (uncredited?) asks why Sandra didn’t herself take her father to the bathroom and Sandra replies it’s something she doesn’t feel able to do. This exchange doesn’t connect with anything else about her attitude towards Georg (while he’s still in his apartment Sandra does see that he gets to the toilet in time). It probably features simply because something similar really happened to the film-maker on a visit to her ailing father …
The film’s penultimate scene is unique in that both main men in Sandra’s life are on screen at the same time even though they barely interact. By now, Georg is settled in a high-quality Montmartre nursing home, where he has physically rallied a bit. The kind nursing staff organise a sing-song for residents in the communal day room. It’s all very jolly but too much for Sandra, who gets upset and, after quickly saying goodbye to her father, exits with Clément and Linn. In the closing scene, the three of them climb the steps to Sacré-Coeur – Linn forgets her limp and runs – and enjoy a wonderful view of the city, with Clément quizzing Linn on famous Paris landmarks. I realise Mia Hansen-Løve’s (many) admirers will find the tears-and-smiles juxtaposition of these last two sequences deeply humane and moving. I found it, like much else in One Fine Morning, conventional and facile.
18 May 2023
[1] According to Wikipedia, this is ‘a rare form of dementia which is considered a visual variant or an atypical variant of Alzheimer’s disease … PCA usually affects people at an earlier age than typical cases of Alzheimer’s disease, with initial symptoms often experienced in people in their mid-fifties or early sixties. This was the case with writer Terry Pratchett (1948–2015), who went public in 2007 about being diagnosed with PCA’.