There is a seductive sort of naturalness in the films of Mia Hansen-Løve, a predisposition for telling stories that don’t seem to warrant the effort. Even in the case of personalities that she has focused her attention on, at times – illustrating people from behind the scenes: a film producer, a DJ, a writer –, what always mattered was this element of “just like us”, their removal from any sort of pedestals and their easy transfer into some living room or park, where each could once more become, to quote the title of one of the films, “the father of my children”. It’s hard for me to imagine a cinematic genre that is further away from Mia Hansen-Løve than that of historical fiction: in her works, everything takes place in a solid present, without nostalgic residues, often projects onto what will come – “the future” (another title), a “from now on” that leaves grief behind to embrace the small adventure ahead (a romantic relationship, a stabilizing routine). That being said, these are no self-help movies that sing the praise of tomorrow, because a new challenge often hides a dead end, if not even an outright regress – but there is always a modest consolation, a way of making peace with fate, a resolution no matter how fragile, which transforms the experience of these films into a serene and tonic act.

With One Fine Morning, the filmmaker takes a step back from the recent transnational experiment that led her to India and Sweden, each with mixed results (in my opinion). Something bothers me both about this minimalist setting of “people just like us” that she aptly wields, and about these cinephile, slightly didactic roundabouts, like the ones in her previous effort, Bergman Island, which, to me – an avowed non-Bergmanian – did not function at all in terms of emotion, which is precisely where these films are supposed to hit the hardest. And so, this step backward is only apparent, because, in fact, she is returning to an established directorial brilliance, but I don’t feel that solves the problem – it doesn’t take the filmmaker out of this safe playground that is basically that of any “additional” French film, which must tread on a ground already trodden. Full disclaimer: I like what Mia Hansen-Løve does and I always anticipate her films with thinly-veiled enthusiasm, since they remind me of high school, alltogether with the sensation that I had back then, that I’d love to live inside a story like this – the teacher, the student, the ex-boyfriend are all fully accessible to me, I already know them. But I can’t help myself, even if only due to social awareness, to not bring this little amendment: is this all that cinema is good for – a chance to identify in terms of middle-class (and tastes)? Isn’t this another stagnation of the myriad artistic possibilities out there, a sort of comfort food of Parisian cinephilia?

I’ll leave the question open and go directly to One Fine Morning, which brings back some familiar elements of this career: the studious and pedantic professor (Pascal Gregory), now in a symptomatic state of decay because of a a neurodegenerative disease. The slightly drifting protagonist (Léa Seydoux), part of a middle class that isn’t doing great, but doesn’t complain too much either, but, as the French say, fait aller. The distant partner (Melvil Poupaud), who comes and goes and comes again, shaking things up almost masochistically, etc. In other words, two Rohmerian actors called upon to envelop the quintessential actress of contemporary French auteur cinema, puzzling her in many ways, one with sickness and pain, another with love (and pain). It’s an interesting angle of approach: a woman that must simultaneously experience a prospective period of grieving (emptying the apartment, abandoning her father’s library) and a less-than-ideal love (her partner is married), hoping to pull a whole, rounded something out of these shards of experience. The normality of life is the final horizon of this narration, something that is admirably exemplified by Nicole Garcia in the role of a feisty ex-wife; a horizon that, on the other hand, is frighteningly abstract for the father that is very delicately portrayed by Pascal Gregory, overwhelming like a burlesque star turned delirious and defective, who has entered an ontological terrain known only to himself.

The film’s reserved tone doesn’t emphasize anything, rather, it just goes on and generates confusion. This is where the pleasure of these small explosions of ill manners derives from (my favorite: while playing Scrabble with her family, constantly thinking about her boyfriend, the heroine laughingly separates the words “SEX” and “BITE” on her letter rack, a casual perversity – like a glass of champagne), explosions that indicate upon the art of a gaze that is still immune to the schematic –isms of the day, but that is instead willing to describe layered things, to make fun of character inconsistencies, to stay as far away from walking slogans as possible. For those who have followed Mia Hansen-Løve ever since she released her magisterial Père de mes enfants (2009), One Fine Morning arrives to us now, in a year as stormy as 2022, with the calmness of an old childhood friend, who knows how to approach you despite the distance and the void that has opened between you in the meantime. There are few filmmakers capable of still generating this experience – like an intimate, unproblematic refuge, surprisingly stable despite the passage of time –, and this is why I believe that these films truly have something therapeutic within them. I use the term without referring to its pejorative, capitalist nuance: as I watch them, something of the old “me”, whom I’d long thought I’d forgotten, is once more allowed to resurface. And amongst many other things, cinema also means this.

One Fine Morning will screen at Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.