Tuesday, 16 January 2024

ONE FINE MORNING ****


 With a Mia Hansen-Love film you know precisely what you are going to get; love stories filled with passion yet passion so artfully disguised you might even mistake it for indifference. No such chance of that happening in "One Fine Morning", however. The passion in Hansen-Love's new movie is almost tangible. Sandra, (a never better Lea Seydoux), is a single mother who also looks after her elderly father, (Pascal Greggory), while working as a translator. One fine morning she meets Clement, (Melvil Poupaud), an old friend and embarks on an affair with him despite his being married.

The passion here isn't just sexual. Hansen-Love gives us a sometimes angry but always passionate account of the ageing process, of illness and of a daughter's love for her father and it's certainly one of her finest and most moving films and every performance is superb down to the smallest part. The director has great affinity, not just with the professional actors but also with the non-professionals she casts as well and that affinity allows her to turn her characters into real people that we, too, can relate to as clearly as Hansen-Love does. Funny and at times painfully sad, just like life, this is a truly wonderful film.

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