112 min | R | January 27, 2023 | Sony Pictures Classics
A widowed Paris translator raises her daughter alone while her father vanishes into a degenerative disease. Then an old friend reappears and her body remembers what it wants. Grief and desire arrive in the same season, and Mia Hansen-Løve refuses to rank them.
Sandra Kienzler is a widowed translator in Paris. She raises a young daughter alone and spends her days interpreting other people’s words while her own life narrows. Her father, a former philosophy professor, is losing his sight and his mind to a degenerative disease. As he disappears, Sandra begins an affair with a married friend and feels desire return to a body she had stopped living in. One Fine Morning watches a father vanish and a woman wake up in the same season, and it refuses to rank one event above the other.
Léa Seydoux plays Sandra with her guard down and her face open. She cries in the back of taxis and on the street, then wipes it away and keeps moving, because there is a child to feed and a father to place in care. Pascal Greggory plays Georg, the father, as a man who knows enough to grieve his own decline and not enough to stop it. His scenes are unbearable because he is still present in the room he is leaving. Melvil Poupaud plays Clément with a guilty tenderness that never hardens into a decision, and Camille Leban Martins, as the daughter Linn, gives the film its only character moving toward life instead of away from it. Nicole Garcia, as Sandra’s mother Françoise, handles the logistics of a dying man with a brisk competence that hides her own fear.
Mia Hansen-Løve writes and directs, and she builds the film out of ellipsis. Scenes end before they finish and seasons change between cuts, so the months pass the way they pass in a hard year, in jumps. The camera works in available light and stays at eye level inside cramped apartments and care facilities, which makes the institutional rooms feel exactly as small as they are. Hansen-Løve withholds a score during the heaviest moments and lets the sound of the city carry them. The result sets grief and pleasure on the same flat plane and trusts the audience to feel the difference without being told.
This is a film about carrying two truths at once. A person can be erased by the body that betrays him while another is restored by the body she rediscovers, and both can happen to the same family in the same week. Hansen-Løve declines to soften that arrangement or to pretend that love arrives as compensation for loss. The affair does not heal the grief and the grief does not poison the affair. One Fine Morning earns its title by refusing the easy version, where dawn means everything is fixed, and offering the harder one, where the morning simply comes.