Film Review: One Fine Morning is engrossing and frequently moving
One Fine Morning stars Léa Seydoux and Pascal Greggory
- One Fine Morning
- ★★★★☆
(15A) stars Léa Seydoux as Sandra Kienzler, a Paris-based translator raising her eight-year-old daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins) alone.
Life is already tough when Sandra’s father Georg (Pascal Greggory) is diagnosed with a neurogenerative disease, which obliges Sandra to seek out an acceptable care home, but then Sandra — who believes that ‘her love life is behind her’ — embarks on a wholly unexpected affair with her dead husband’s friend Clément (Melvil Poupad), who is emotionally unavailable, i.e., married.
This is about as French as a French movie is likely to get — we need hardly tell you that Georg is a retired philosopher with an abiding passion for Kafka, and especially his 'Metamorphosis'. is an engrossing and frequently moving drama, in large part because Léa Seydoux is so emotionally eloquent in the main role as she comes to realise that her relationship with Clément is no ordinary Parisian affair, but — she feels — her very last chance at happiness.
There are strong performances too from Melvil Poupad and the young Camille Leban Martins, although Pascal Greggory steals every scene he’s in with his portrayal of a man once revered as an intellectual but who is now only vaguely aware that he is unable to find the bathroom alone.
Directed with an rigorously unsentimental eye by Mia Hansen-Løve, is a heart-breaking work of love, loss and transformation.
(cinema release)
