Léa Seydoux gives a quietly heartbreaking performance in One Fine Morning. The affecting new drama from Mia Hansen-Løve is now playing in theaters.
There’s a quiet magic present in all of Mia Hansen-Løve’s films. Over the past 15 years, the French writer-director has slowly established herself as one of cinema’s most unique and assured contemporary voices. Her 2021 film, Bergman Island, not only felt in many ways like Hansen-Løve’s biggest and most accessible film to date but also her most structurally effective and artistically assured. Now, two years later, Hansen-Løve has returned with One Fine Morning.
The new film has more in common with some of Hansen-Løve’s past French-language films — namely, 2014’s Things to Come — than it does with Bergman Island. Many of the biggest hallmarks of its filmmaker’s past work are present in One Fine Morning, which follows a woman who, in typical Hansen-Løve fashion, never slows down or pauses long enough to let herself think as deeply as she deserves. Coming off her recent collaborations with Isabelle Huppert and Vicky Krieps, One Fine Morning also sees Hansen-Løve direct Léa Seydoux, another one of international cinema’s brightest faces, for the first time.
While the film isn’t quite as thematically or stylistically impactful as Bergman Island, Seydoux’s fearless lead performance grounds it in an emotional space that proves to be far more expansive than it may initially appear.
Seydoux stars in One Fine Morning as Sandra Kienzler, a professional translator and single mother who spends most of her days worrying about and caring for her elderly father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), who has been crippled by a neuro-degenerative disease that has robbed him of his sight and cognitive abilities.
