Mia Hansen-Løve’s eighth feature has been heralded as a return to form after the lamentable Bergman Island. It’s a low bar, but sure, we’ll allow it. Hansen-Løve has always ploughed her own meandering narrative furrow, occasionally with spectacular results (Eden), and occasionally not (Maya).
In common with every second French release since Gaspar Noe’s Vortex, the writer-director’s new film concerns a Parisian struggling with an ageing academic parent. More devastatingly, if you thought the people behind the latest James Bond venture, No Time for Diapers, had unfairly turned Seydoux into a pair of mom jeans under an unflattering haircut, wait until you see her no-nonsense Arlene Foster ‘do in One Fine Morning.
Between them, Hansen-Løve and Seydoux have created an engaging character study, even if the film doesn’t quite coalesce into a pleasing dramatic structure.
Seydoux’s Sandra is a widowed mother to her preteen daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins). She is juggling motherhood, work as a translator, and healthcare decisions for her father Georg (Pascal Greggory), as he succumbs to Benson’s Disorder, a neurodegenerative disorder that causes loss of sight and memory.
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After Sandra reconnects with old chum Clément (Melvil Poupand), an improbably dashing, and very married scientist, she embarks on an affair quickly beset by complications.
Seydoux and Poupand bring plenty of emotional clout to their roles, even if the script straddles uncomfortably between verité and melodrama. They go to the park but seldom engage in the everyday busywork that defines realism.
Seydoux’s sadness is palpable even when the whirl of random scenes around her — a speech from a US Army veteran at an Omaha Beach reunion, a project concerning the letters of Annemarie Schwarzenbach — fail to connect with each other or, indeed, the viewer. The film also excels as a chronicle of a lived-in Paris, where tourist spots such as Sacré-Cœur Basilica’s butte make for meaningful family strolls.
