One Fine Morning (2022 | France | 112 minutes | Mia Hansen-Løve)

A key disappearance play out in the the grinding rhythms of real life in One Fine Morning. As Sandra, Lea Seydoux plays a widowed translator raising her young daughter in a cosy Parisian apartment. Her own divorced father, a philosophy professor (Pascal Greggory), has recently been diagnosed with a degenerative neurological condition that requires more and more supervision than his daughters or longtime companion can provide. It’s the sort of relatable slow-motion tragedy that almost everyone does their best to believe that they’ll be immune to facing themselves.

Rather than look away, Mia Hansen-Løve’s delicate drama swims in the reality, of the joys, sorrows, and daily respites of a fully-inhabited life. While she, her mother, and sister negotiate the unpleasant complexities of finding a place for him to live, she surprisingly reconnects with an old friend (an oft-adventuring cosmo-chemist played by Melvil Poupaud). His serendipitous return sets off an adulterous spark, ill-advised, but who can blame her.

In the grief of her husband’s death and the necessity of caring for her smart and well-adjusted daughter, Sandra had closed off the potential for romance in her life. So over the course of the intimately observed film, the deeply sensual couplings by two telegenic actors provide escape — for characters and audiences alike — from the cruel mundanities of family obligations even as they introduce new forms of drama and heartbreak. The tension is quintessential French drama in its candor, shared in the richly-realized but never melodramatic style that Hansen-Løve has established as a signature.

Like affairs of the heart, the procedures for securing eldercare for her declining father are rarely straightforward. The small peaks and valleys of each unfold in parallel, with each small success threatened to be undone by another minor but crushing setbacks. While there are few moments of great triumph in a story of complicated adult relationships and terminal diagnoses, again and again Mia Hansen-Løve flexes her particular genius for finding the profound in pedestrian rhythms of life. Here, she stares into the inevitable abyss of aging with a resigned but undefeated sigh.

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