By Jordan Cronk

Following last year’s conceptually slippery Bergman Island, Mia Hansen-Løve is back on terra firma with One Fine Morning, a bittersweet tale about the precariousness of life and love set in modern-day Paris. Starring Léa Seydoux as Sandra, a widowed single mother and freelance translator whose elderly father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), is sick and in need of professional care, the film slots comfortably alongside Hansen-Løve’s previous domestic studies Le Père de mes enfants (2009) and L’avenir (2016), but ultimately assumes a form closer to that most Gallic of genres: the infidelity drama. 

When Sandra reconnects with an old acquaintance, Clément (Melvil Poupaud), and the two strike up an affair, her life is thrown off-kilter. Clément is married and not ready to leave his wife and son, and although they both make efforts to end the relationship, Sandra can’t bring herself to call it off completely, believing deep down that their passion will eventually win out.

While One Fine Morning bears a passing resemblance to Hansen-Løve’s more modest efforts, it carries an air of casual complexity and an understated aesthetic elegance that feels indebted to the strides made with the more outwardly ambitious likes of Eden (2014) and Bergman Island. The film’s date-stamped structure, discrete use of voiceover, and subtle narrative ellipses lend it a quasi-novelistic, even poetic, sheen (the title is a reference to a poem by Jacques Prévert), while small stylistic touches, such as Denis Lenoir’s sun-streaked 35mm cinematography and a beautifully animated closing shot, imbue a familiar story and setting with deceptive breadth and unexpected emotion. In a year with no shortage of similarly themed French films (see Claire Denis’ Avec amour et acharnement and Emmanuel Mouret’s Chronique d’une liaison passagère), One Fine Morning makes a case for itself not by upending conventions, but by applying them with care and consideration.

Jordan Cronk