One Fine Morning (2022)
Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve
Chicago International Film Festival 2022
This American Life, Episode 776. Islanders in Hawaii are notified of an incoming ballistic missile attack. A man doesn’t know if he’ll survive, or when this incoming attack is set to happen. And so he reflects and sends a text to an ex: “Lynn, I just got word that a nuclear missile on its way to Honolulu. I'm not sure where you are or if you'll even read this, but I thought of you. I wanted to let you know that looking back, you were the love of my life. If it is, in fact, over in a few minutes, thank you for the time we spent together."
Mia Hansen-Løve’s incredible new film, One Fine Morning, details a life at its intersection. In many ways it functions as a worthy companion piece to Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, a film about a millennial woman confronting romance and death in equal measure. But when looking at Hansen-Løve’s oeuvre, this operates as the connective ligament between Goodbye First Love and Thing to Come; stories of infidelities, romance, and navigating life with and without relationships. Sandra (Léa Seydoux) is a single-mother, caring for both her daughter and ailing father. Her father, Georg (Pascal Greggory) is diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy. Referred to as Benson’s Syndrome, it’s more or less an off-shoot of Alzheimer’s only with frontotemporal dementia of the temporal lobes; i.e; intense hallucinations. Georg, a retired philosophy professor, now struggles to even read; a positively Cronenbergian example of self betrayal.
Sandra encounters an old friend in Clément (Melvil Poupaud), a married cosmo-chemist with a son of his own. The two have an easy-going rapport, with Clément confiding details about his long and floundering marriage. Sandra has been celebate for five years, feeling like her time for love has come and gone. But the two form a connection and, in traditional French fashion, they embrace. Sometimes I wonder if I was French in a previous life. Initially a purely carnal exercise, the two begin going out more frequently and their bond only strengthens. Meanwhile, Sandra takes her father from one nursing home to the next, struggling to find the care that he needs as he slowly deteriorates.
The two narratives converge and communicate with each other in subtle ways. Sandra finds comfort in Clément’s embrace, serving as a long absent presence for both herself and her daughter. But it’s an unstable relationship, given that Clément divides his time between Sandra and his wife. If their passionate lovemaking doesn’t ground Sandra, then it’s merely the missed companionship that keeps her afloat as she struggles with witnessing her father lose all sense of self. In the film’s most striking sequence, Georg wanders the halls of his nursing home, beckoning the name of his longtime partner. Strip away the mind and you have nothing but instinct, and it’s the name of his partner that remains imprinted at the tip of his brain.
My definition of love has undergone numerous revisions and edits over the past few years. For a long time I thought that being with my high school girlfriend meant something important, like maintaining that relationship for the sake of its story was more vital than my own happiness. Any whirlwind of passion or chaos tends to escalate all feelings, producing enough endorphins to overlook all the obvious red flags. It took a long time to clear the rubble and find out what I wanted in a relationship. Honestly, I’m still not entirely sure what I want; instead it’s been an exercise in finding out what I don’t need in my life anymore. But it begs the question: whose name am I going to call when I lose all sense of self? I see my father and how quickly his mind has failed him. It’s a distorted mirror of myself, a preview of coming attractions. And I welcome, sometimes endure, the present. But what will happen when I’m confronted with the immediate? When it’s only the end of the world, whose name will I beckon? Mia Hansen-Løve’s films have all been tender exercises in finding our place in the world and the litany of relationships that make up who we become. But subtly, I think this is her finest work, a conscious, and thoughtful film about looking forward, looking backward, and falling back into place within the present.