Movie Review: 'One Fine Morning' Lea Seydoux Shines in Thoughtful Romantic Drama

One Fine Morning (2022)

Directed by Mia Hansen Love

Written by Mia Hansen Love

Starring Lea Seydoux, Pascal Gregory, Melvil Poupaud, Nicole Garcia

Release Date December 9th, 2022

Published December 13th, 2022

One Fine Morning stars Lea Seydoux as Sandra, a lonely, French, single mom. Sandra's days center on her lovely daughter and visiting her ailing father, Georg (Pascal Gregory). Sandra's father is slowly slipping away following a stroke. He can no longer care for himself and much of the movie is about him being shuffled from one care center to another as Sandra, her sister, and her mother, try to find a place that will take good care of Georg in his final years.

Sandra's story shifts when she runs into an old friend at the park with her daughter. Clement (Melvil Poupaud) was a friend of Sandra's late husband. The two always had chemistry but she was married and so was he. He still is married but that doesn't stop him from openly flirting with Sandra. For her part, Sandra welcomes the flirting and more. Despite some reservations, Sandra welcomes Clement to her bed and the two begin a fraught affair.

Meanwhile, Sandra is helping to pack up the life of her father. The once great man, a professor of literature, defined by the books he loved, can no longer remember the stories that made him who he was. In a lovely monologue, Sandra explains to her young daughter why her grandfather's books meant so much to him. It's one of the most emotional and lovely moments in any film in 2022. I can't do it justice by trying to repeat it, just see this movies.

One Fine Morning is not the kind of movie that lingers on scenes, it's a movie that lingers in feeling. Director Mia Hansen Love crafts an emotional world and the movie lives in these feelings, these airy, open, often raw, emotional spaces. The story may appear stagnant to the impatient observer, but Hansen-Love and her cast are slowly carrying you along on an emotional wave, one that doesn't crash so much as it crests lovingly, caressing the beaches of bigger meanings and emotional truth.

If that's not for you, then One Fine Morning is not for you. That's too bad for you, this movie is wonderful. It's a lovely film of depth, heartache, beauty, joy, and sex. It's a movie about the truth of emotional and intimate bonds, about the hard decisions we make when love rises and falls. It's a hard truth, the ending of one relationship to start another one is fraught with heartache that intensifies and recedes. One Fine Morning is incredibly honest about heartache but also about love, desire, loneliness, and intimacy.

There are no easy answers when someone leaves one family start another. One Fine Morning doesn't pretend toward an answer. There are no heroes or villains, just people whose feelings are hurt and how they heal and learn from that hurt. One Fine Morning is about the lessons we learn in life each and everyday and how every choice is a chance to learn something new about ourselves and the people we care about. That's not an easy thing to communicate in a movie but Mia Hansen-Love and her stellar cast communicate it beautifully.

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