One Fine Morning (Un Beau Matin)

One Fine Morning reads like a title thought up by of one of Mad magazines finest writers, the late Don Martin. But this is no surreal comic fantasy, this is a poignant story that is very firmly grounded in the real world.

Sandra (Léa Seydoux) is a translator, widowed with a young daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins), living in Paris. A life complicated by having to look after her father Georg (Pascal Greggory) who has a degenerative neurological disease, that has left him blind and is slowly eroding his mind.

Sandra doesn’t have that much of a social life – fleeting encounters they could be described - though that becomes more adventurous when she bumps into Clement (Melvil Poupaud) a lover from way back. He’s now married with a young son though its unhappy. The affair is difficult and combined with the pressures on her, and sister Elodie (Sarah le Picard), with their father who cannot stay at home on his own any longer and has to be found a home.

Writer and director Mia Hansen-Løve has basically three different stories here that, through deft writing and direction, she draws out excellent performances and interlocks them successfully. Sandra is trying to get through with a daughter who is growing up fast asking questions, while at the same time her father is facing his mortality, occasionally lucid, others unable to recognise his own family.

Into this comes Clément, a charming, clever man who seems ideal save for his marriage that he claims is failing. Though he walks away once he walks back again. The impression given is of a weak-willed man, and he’s irritating for the duration of the film. Why Sandra persists with him may well be questions that some viewers will ask, as his prevarication takes its toll on her at work and domestically.

Though understated Hansen-Løve also looks at the French care system, its complexities and failings. Having gone through something similar with elderly parents when one becomes incapacitated, I can understand the sisters’ frustrations.

A more subtle element is the dread that Georg knew what was happening to him, as Sandra finds out reading her father’s journals. An academic he notes his visits to the specialists; recognising that things aren’t going well, as his handwriting begins to fail. It’s a recognition of his own mortality and desperately moving.

There are a couple of recent French films that are broadly similar in subject matter. Francois Ozon’s Everything Went Fine and Gaspar Noé’s Vortex. Ozon’s has direct involvement of daughters and the care of their stroke-victim father. While Noé digs deeper into the onset of mental illness on wife and mother, seen through husband and son. One Fine Morning sits comfortably with them.

One Fine Morning will be in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from 14 April and exclusively on Mubi from 16 June 2023.