Sandra (Léa Seydoux) lives a cluttered but satisfying life. She works as a translator. She’s a widow and a mother. And she tends to her blind and increasingly dementia-addled father, who was once a philosophy professor, but is now a shell of his former self. She keeps very busy, so it doesn’t seem to bother her much that she’s single.
And then she runs into Clément (Melvil Poupaud), an old friend – of hers and her late husband – and father to one of her daughter’s classmates. They get on well, but there’s something there, an unspoken attraction they’ve never acted on, because he’s married. And then they act on it, with a first kiss that is so perfectly teed up and executed (delicate, funny, sexy, warm) that you can’t blame them for going further. He comes over to her apartment for sex, which is tricky with her daughter sleeping in the next room (they’ve barely started making out when the little girl calls out, “I’m thirsty!”). When the time comes, she’s worried “I’ve forgotten how.”
“You can’t forget,” he replies.
“I did.” (Spoiler: she didn’t.)
One of the many lovely qualities of Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning is how evocatively it dramatizes that delightful period in a new relationship when you simply cannot keep your hands off each other. And the casual and physical nature of the relationship seems to suit Sandra just fine; it’s not like she has the energy for an emotional bond, or a full-time boyfriend. She, her sister, and her mother are moving her father into assisted living, which takes a psychological toll on all of them – but it seems to hit Sandra especially hard, sorting through all of the things and figuring out what to do with his books. “I feel closer to my father with his books than with him,” she explains. (The logistics of library management are one of the film’s many accidental but noteworthy commonalities with last year’s Vortex.)
But the more emotional and vulnerable her family situation becomes, the more she finds herself wanting more from Clément. But, again, he’s married. “It’s a nightmare,” he says of that relationship. “I try not to burden you.” And so they slip away when they can, and make the most of what they have, and they send each other sweet texts, but she begins to resent him, just a little.
Hansen-Løve’s perceptive screenplay understands how these relationships wind up and unspool, how things that begin cool and shrugging, slowly but surely, are not. She doesn’t judge either Sandra or Clément, which is important, because this isn’t a story about fidelity or morality, or even, really, about love. It’s about getting in over your head, and being swept away in the process.
Her script is also structurally sharp – she tells these two stories, of an ending in Sandra’s life and and (possibly) a beginning, simultaneously, understanding how the walls one puts up, the neat boxes that we used to compartmentalize our emotional, physical, and intellectual needs, tend to crumple up like paper under the slightest bit of pressure. It’s not a plotty film – things don’t so much happen as life unfurls, organically. Much like Hansen-Løve’s 2015 Isabelle Huppert vehicle Things to Come, it’s less a showcase for an earth-shattering story than a truly gifted actor; there are certain people who can hold our attention doing just about anything onscreen, and Huppert is one, and Seydoux is another.
So to call One Fine Morning a slice-of-life drama seems inadequate, a phrase that minimizes what Hansen-Løve’s doing. This is a slice of a specific life, one that looks ordinary, but is unique and complicated and sometimes harrowing, particularly in private moments when no one’s watching. So pay attention to the look on her face as the elevator door closes, or as she smiles and cries on the bus, her joy curdling in the pain. There’s more to this performance than it seems. Same goes for the movie. 
A-
“One Fine Morning” is in theaters Friday.
