Bettine Mackenzie

 One Fine Morning (2022)

Written and Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

I want to be in One Fine Morning again. Mia Hansen-Love’s films give me a feeling of being somewhere and with people I once knew, as well as I knew my family, a feeling of going to my childhood home as an adult but seeing the comfortable at an unnerving distance. It’s a feeling of the uncanny, I’ve grown out of it; it’s all still there but out of reach. Tension could break out at any moment between all of us who know each other well, too well, too much as our childhood versions. But there is relief and comfort when, miraculously, it doesn’t, and unusual permanent love shines through. Her films always have solitary love winning out.

One Fine Morning opens with Lea Seydoux strolling down a Parisian street in the Spring to jazz by Jan Johannson. The seasons play a part in the film: the colours shift from postcard blue and yellow in summer to deep grey and white in winter, with the clothes matching. I’ve never noticed a character’s clothes so much as I did here: Lea Seydoux, as Sandra, is at first childlike in her striped t-shirt, then feminine in short dresses as she swills around in the perfect love affair, occasionally buttoned and taught in her work as a translator, and it’s telling when situations combine. At one point she asks her father, the key lost soul to her life, whether he can see the floral pattern on her dress. Sandra is really asking if he can see her, asking for validation as an adult reborn - and it matters. He replies that he can’t. 

The plot is this: Sandra is a widowed single mother raising her daughter alone in a small flat. Her father, a respected philosophy professor is deteriorating quickly from Bensen’s syndrome - a rare form of Alzheimer’s - and whilst Sandra’s existence is now fully preoccupied by his condition, she one day bumps into an old friend in the park, Clement - a married cosmologist with whom she starts a passionate love affair. Her life is rekindled after four years of singledom. Clement is a guiding star leading her out of the fog that keeps on trying to interrupt her vision of living, just as it fully takes over her father’s. 

The unconventional intellectual French family that is Mia Hansen Love’s own is here (Love’s real life parents were divorced professors and her father suffered from this same illness as Georg, Sandra’s father, does in the film). There’s a brilliant moment when nurses come to Georg’s flat to assess him for assisted living and the entire crew are introduced by Georg’s ex-wife with a sweep of her eye. “These are his daughters, I’m his ex-wife, and that’s his companion” she says with nonchalance. The scene ends with a medium shot of Georg and his “companion”, Leila, who looks outwards towards the camera with self-conscious confidence, aware of her position both as the odd one out and the only one with the key to Georg’s soul. And so she is, and this is one of the most tender and awful stems of the film. Whilst Sandra spends her days doggedly visiting Georg in the various homes he ends up in, putting on a brave face and failing to engage him with old favourites like Schubert, it is Leila he calls out for. “Leila?” he asks the walls as he wanders around the corridors like all the other patients. He’s part of the wandering troupe, truly one of them, in the way we never think our own parents will be. 

When Leila does finally arrive he sinks into her neck. “I was so worried,” he says. This part of him, Leila, has been missing from him, “tu me manques” in French literally translating to ‘you are missing from me’. And what’s so magical, so unexplainable, is that he recognised it, in this time of total unfamiliarity, because familiarity is where he is leaving, and because Leila means Love. Love not of the familial kind but the hopeful kind, the kind that makes us uncertain and unusual and unrecognisable to our families who once knew us so well. We are taken into the potential for a new life with this love, and I see this film as about that: the kind of loving that rips you away from the self that was born into the preplanned, rips you away from your family. This transition is Leila. The sound of her name represents it as Georg chants-moans down the empty corridors. We live for Leila: she is re-birth. 

Sandra is broken by her father’s lack of attention (and Lea’s performance is extraordinary, subtle, wrenching, her tears are true) but she is experiencing the same renaissance through Clement. As a translator she is a mediator, lip-reading every situation, an expert in paying attention and interpreting how the sentence will play out only one beat after the first word’s been uttered. But Clement is a chemical cosmologist, as he keeps on reminding Sandra when she mistakenly introduces him as an astro-physicist; he looks to the distance, not up close. He is an escape but also unattainable, and it’s this we also cling onto in the hope-type-Leila-type of love. The potential for abandonment, which Clement fulfils constantly for Sandra throughout the film. Clement, to me, is a satellite not a star: a pretender. As he tells Sandra’s daughter one day, the shooting stars we see are not really stars but dust lingering after the object has died. This is of course either the flip side of hope-love (that it does not really exist but is more beautiful than anything else in the universe) or the reassurance of family-love (that lingers and exists long after the bright lights have shone and disappeared to leave nothing real behind). 

 “There are three important people in my life” Georg announces one day whilst Sandra rootles around in the closet, half-listening. “Leila is one. Myself is another…” Sandra asks him who the third is. “I can’t remember the third,” Georg replies. He has split himself in two, or formed himself from double, and the missing part, the formative family, is no longer relevant. The ending of the film sees Clement and Sandra touching hands behind the back of Sandra’s daughter as the new family unit looks out over Paris. The couple stare at the middle distance together, neither the stars nor lips now but the sights of the city from Sacre-Coeur (Sacred Heart). It's a postcard image of perfect love: romance and stability in the city of love. But they seem suspended on this white floating viewing platform, ignoring what’s really behind or in front. As Georg proves: when the past and future is fully removed, we just long for the moments that once upon a time rooted us to hopeful unpredictability. To be reborn again and again, as Leila Love cruelly and beautifully does.