One Fine Morning (Un Beau Matin)

 

Writer/director Mia Hansen-Løve

Léa Seydoux with the director

ONE FINE MORNING (Un Beau Matin)                B+                                                           France  Great Britain  Germany  (112 mi)  2022  d: Mia Hansen-Løve

Premiering at Directors’ Fortnight at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, Mia Hansen-Løve describes her films as “imagination and experience meeting,” as they tend to be about women who find themselves on a journey of discovery during pivotal moments in their lives, reflective of her own personal experience, a practice she has established throughout her career with films like All Is Forgiven (Tout est pardonée) (2007), Goodbye First Love (Un Amour de Jeunesse) (2011), Eden (2014), Things to Come (L'avenir) (2016), and Bergman Island (2021), where this story was written just before the death of her father, exploring the lasting impact of such an imprinting relationship.  Both of Hansen-Løve’s parents were philosophy professors, with her father also working as a translator, while she studied German and minored in philosophy at university, with this film establishing profound philosophical implications that mirror her own journey, yet she’s one of the few filmmakers to offer a deeply meditative portrait of humanity with such a light touch.  Producing gentle slice-of-life films, shot on 35mm by Denis Lenoir, who also shot her three previous films, this features a woman in her thirties who works as an official interpreter during a turning point in her life, having lost her husband years earlier, raising her young daughter alone in the bustling city of Paris, yet two life-changing events collide with a resounding impact, the declining health of her father, a longtime professor debilitated from a neurodegenerative disease, no longer able to care for himself (her father suffered from the same ailment), and romantic sparks from a lifelong friend who is unhappily stuck in a loveless marriage, offering sober reflections on loss and separation while simultaneously a new love develops.  Often blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, with a flair for subtle nuances and precise observation, Hansen-Løve’s films are built by establishing rhythms of life, using narrative strands to establish character, much like a short story writer, creating a naturalistic language of her own that is tender and poetic, designed to establish empathy, and can be uniquely transformative, bearing some resemblance to the meticulous detail of André Téchiné, a master technician whose elegant films are similarly actor-forward and delve into the complexities of human emotion and relationships.  There’s also a minimalist simplicity to this film that resembles the tender father-daughter relationship in Ozu’s Late Spring (Banshun) (1949), both offering a haunting glimpse of life without adding documentary detail.  In an interesting aside, the lead protagonist is a translator of the works of Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a Swiss author who wrote in German, reading her published letters to Klaus Mann, one of Thomas Mann’s children, which is the subject of Mia Hansen-Løve’s next film project, something percolating for about fifteen years, developing an obsessional interest, turning into a made-for-TV miniseries (The Flame), though Hansen-Løve acknowledges she doesn’t even own a television.  This film was written with Léa Seydoux in mind, a generational French actress who typically exercises emotional restraint, which was evident early on in films like Christophe Honoré’s La Belle Personne (The Beautiful Person) (2008) and Rebecca Zlotowski’s Belle Épine (2010), before becoming a breakout international star after the success of Abdellatif Kechiche’s controversial Palme d’Or winning film Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle, Chapitres 1 et 2) (2013), the first to award the prize not only to the director but the two lead actresses as well.  Seydoux reported the male director’s style was overly abusive during the sex scenes, and repetitive, taking ten days to complete a lengthy sex scene, making her feel like a prostitute, so Hansen-Løve was very protective of her (Mia Hansen-Løve Denounces Hollywood's Sex Scenes), acknowledging she is an extremely shy actress, so she worked to establish a degree of safety and trust before shooting the kissing and graphic sex scenes, where it’s significant to point out that women filmmakers demonstrate a different awareness in this area, with Seydoux praising the director afterwards, insisting, “Mia has a remarkable blend of precision and sensitivity.”  While Hansen-Løve acknowledges she finds it much easier to direct women, making films exclusively with female protagonists since 2015, Seydoux has rewarded her with one of her finest performances, where the self-contained, raw emotion on display is the centerpiece of the film, allowing larger issues to fully penetrate on a deeper scale.   

Sandra Kienzler (Léa Seydoux in an unglamorous role wearing no makeup, with a short-cropped, Jean Seberg-style pixie haircut), lives with her young 8-year old daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins), who still sneaks into her mother’s bed at night to snuggle, exhibiting a warm and affectionate relationship, where it’s clear they enjoy each other’s company, doing projects together, seen picking her up after school, while also making regular visits to grandparents, including the director’s own 98-year-old grandmother with all her mental faculties still intact, and despite things physically breaking down over time, she refuses to be viewed with pity, and her father Georg, played by an aging Pascal Greggory, who once appeared as an effusive talker and jealous love interest in Éric Rohmer’s PAULINE AT THE BEACH (1983).  Georg has an established reputation in academia as a renowned German literature and philosophy professor, a man who values “clarity and rigor,” but his health has taken a sharp turn for the worse, diagnosed with Benson’s syndrome, a creeping brain deterioration already affecting his ability to read and write, leaving him nearly blind, including symptoms of dementia, where he’s having a hard time living on his own, unable to complete his own thoughts, but Sandra patiently cares for him with a noticeable tenderness, often completing his sentences, but he’s already exhibiting extreme signs of forgetfulness, needing guidance for every mundane activity, like eating or going to the bathroom, while there’s a heartbreaking sequence where she has to instruct him how to open the door.  While in the park with Linn, she runs into an old friend of her husband, Clément, Melvil Poupaud, who once starred as a young heartthrob in Éric Rohmer’s A Summer's Tale (Conte d'été) (1996), having shed his boyishness yet still maintaining a middle-aged charm, as the director establishes a rhythm alternating between beautiful and sad moments, with Sandra going through a roller coaster ride of constantly shifting emotions.  Their troubled romance subverts the norm, becoming a messy and unvarnished affair filled with unpleasant twists and turns, resembling our own troublesome lives, where there’s always an unwelcome or unexpected intrusion.  His job as a chemical cosmologist takes him to the ends of the earth, having recently returned from Antarctica, studying extraterrestrial meteorite dust left around the globe, (5200 tons of meteorite dust falls to Earth every year), where the extended time away from home has put a strain on his marriage, yet they manage to joke around over who kissed the other first, igniting a torrid love affair, her own avenue of escape from the brutal reality of her father’s disease, though he yo-yo’s back and forth dividing his time between the two women, unable to break away from his wife and young son.  Adding to the distress, Sandra’s mother Françoise (Nicole Garcia), who divorced Georg ages ago but helps care for him, reveals that he can no longer live on his own and that they need to find a nursing home, a deeply depressing prospect, as it’s difficult to spend any time in these dreary facilities because patient care is not prioritized, so they are basically left on their own.  With no other options, however, he moves around through various facilities in an arduous odyssey searching for the right one, exploring public versus private, discovering beds are not readily available, revealing the shortcomings of available services, while at the same time, they have to pack up his belongings and try to figure out what to do with them, which is an emotionally exhaustive process.  This may be the most true-to-life of any of Hansen-Løve’s films, as it’s grounded in such distressing and emotionally frustrating experiences that just about everyone has to deal with, as parents grow old and infirmed, where this is about having compassion for old age, while also learning to deal with deadly diseases inevitably leading to tragic endings.  This film hides none of that, told in measured tones fluctuating between the summer and winter seasons, exposing the toll it takes on family members, ONE FINE MORNING (2022) | Official Clip YouTube (49 seconds), yet paring this traumatic experience with the Madame Bovary consequences of adultery, while reserving all moral judgement, makes this feel distinctly French.  There are joyous moments as well, like when Sandra and Clément take a break from having nonstop sex in her cloistered apartment and visit an art museum, where she blends in with Monet’s Water Lilies at the Musée de l'Orangerie (Seydoux appears in a Louis Vuitton ad in the same location), or the affectionately drawn mother-daughter moment when Sandra asks Linn for a lick of her ice cream and then steals the whole cone, or the hilarious Christmas Eve family reenactment of the arrival of Santa and his reindeer to the delight of giggling children who are discreetly tucked away and listening with their ears to the door.

Hansen-Løve is known for compassionate character studies, and here they are vibrantly created, filled with personality and charm, especially Françoise, an aging 60’s radical who still thrives on disruptive and often illegal civil disobedience protests with Extinction Rebellion, adding a jolt to her personality, though Sandra at one point indicates she’s not particularly trustworthy, all of which gives her a distinctive edge.  Sandra and Clément can be exhilarating together, featuring scintillating dialogue and naturalistic sex scenes, but then they’re bogged down by issues with his family, who we never see, with the camera remaining focused upon Sandra, who is caught between hope and disappointment, staying fixated on her phone waiting for a response from him, One Fine Morning Movie Clip - I Love You (2023) YouTube (1:02).  Her job as a French-German-English interpreter takes her into formal diplomatic sessions taking place in closed-door parliamentary meetings, her profession isn’t reliant upon one culture or language, embracing a larger world sensibility, so there’s a curious cinematic reference when we see Sandra in a theater watching Brigitte Helm in the Hanns Schwarz German silent drama THE WONDERFUL LIES OF NINA PETROVNA (1929, which allows her to be seen in a silent setting.  Yet one of the most dramatically compelling sequences happens at a Memorial tribute commemorating the Normandy D-Day landing (D-Day: The Allies Invade Europe), a chilling historical reminder, and while the scene is short and compact, probably just a minute or so of screen time, the power of sacrifice still resonates with its hair-raising implications.  At the nursing home, Georg talks constantly about his girlfriend Leila (Fejria Deliba), seen only briefly, and while she visits regularly, he can be seen wandering the halls searching for her, as she’s the only one he actually remembers, having forgotten everybody else, including his daughter, who is completely devoted to him.  Sandra finds a notebook her father used to keep track of his declining health, which reminds him of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, an astonishing and somewhat surreal revelation, feeling trapped in the illness, like being caught in an abyss where there is no beginning and no end.  She also identifies a rough manuscript for the memoirs he always intended to write, which she reveals to her family during a Christmas dinner, noting the title of one of the notebooks was written in German, Um einem schönen Morgen, which translates to One Fine Morning, with this film serving as a transmitted completion of that unwritten work.  Included in the director’s submitted ballot for the once per decade 2012 BFI Sight and Sound poll for greatest films, Mia Hansen-Løve, listed again on her 2022 ballot, (All voters - Sight and Sound), she includes Maurice Pialat’s The House in the Woods (La Maison des Bois) (1971), an expansive six-hour film made for French television, yet it unfolds with a literary style, using a recurring musical theme that plays at the end of each of the 7 chapter headings.  She employs a similar device here, where a recurring musical theme feels like pages turning in a book, Jan Johansson - Liksom en herdinna (Official Audio) - YouTube (2:57), borrowing this theme from Bergman’s THE TOUCH (1971), also featuring an adulterous affair, with suggestions that music carries with it the memories of those associated with it.  In similar fashion, there’s a beautiful moment where Sandra, looking at her father’s extensive library collection with complete editions of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Kafka, his most prized possessions that took a lifetime to accumulate (actually filming her own father’s books), confesses “I feel closer to him around his books than when I’m around him.”  This association lingers well after death, as these memories are our way of holding onto those we cherish.  Perhaps the most heartbreaking moment occurs when she brings her father a CD player, allowing him to listen to his favorite music, yet when she plays his most beloved piece, Schubert: Piano Sonata No. 20 in A, D.959 - 2. Andantino YouTube (7:17), he recognizes it instantly, but quickly needs her to shut it off, as it’s too painful for him, written with the composer’s knowledge that his death was imminent, playing again in her head during the bus ride home.  It’s a tragic reveal, as he’s already lost his ability to read, which he valued more than anything, where all that’s left is a further descent into forgetfulness.  Charged with understated filmmaking, the subtle yet poignant power of this film offers clear insight into death and aging, yet it’s never overwrought or melodramatic, interjecting humor in the most improbable moments, offering a surprising amount of clarity that few other films can offer, making beautiful use of the Sacré-Cœur Basilica in an eye-opening panoramic view of Paris from the dome lookout, ending with a film-defining song, Bill Fay - Love Will Remain (Official Audio) - YouTube (2:24).

A Childhood (Une enfance)

A CHILDHOOD (Une enfance)        B+                  

France (100 mi)  2015  d:  Phillipe Claudel

Philippe Claudel has written half a dozen novels and spent more than a decade working as a teacher in prisons, currently a Professor of Literature at the University of Lyon while turning out his fourth film, a coming-of-age foray into social realism, using a novelistic, kitchen sink style portrait of a child coping with the brutality of life while living a marginal existence, following Jimmy (Alexei Mathieu), a 12-year old in 5th grade, having already repeated two grades.  As much a portrait of a deeply troubled child as it is the working class environment where he lives, it’s appropriately set in the filmmaker’s home town of Dombasle-sur-Meurthe, a small industrial town of less than 10,000 residents in northeastern France not far from the German border.  No one photographs children like the French, where they seem to have a mastery over the medium.  To the filmmaker’s credit, except for a few exceptions, the small cast consists of non-professionals working for the first time, where he plans to revisit the subject of Jimmy in three and six years from now, completing a trilogy by the time he turns 18.  Using the Truffaut template from The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959) or The Kid With a Bike (Le gamin au vélo) (2011) from the Dardennes brothers, the strongest elements of the film are its naturalism and the stunning power of Mathieu’s performance.  From the outset we see the difficulty he’s in, all but ignored by his drug addicted mother Pris (Angelica Sarre) who has just been released from prison, living on her welfare check, while her boyfriend Duke, Pierre Deladonchamps, last seen in Stranger By the Lake (L'inconnu du lac) (2013), is an obnoxious, continually agitating petty thief, dope dealer and pimp that ridicules the working class while sitting on his ass watching television, drinking beer, and an assortment of other drugs while abusively scaring the living bejesus out of the kids to leave them alone, where Jimmy and his 9-year old brother Kevin (Jules Gauzelin) are forced to take care of themselves, which includes setting the morning alarm, making sure his little brother is up, clean and fed, as they’re off to school without the adults so much as moving an inch, as they spend their nights partying and making a racket, drinking and consuming whatever drugs they can find.  Duke is a candidate for the worst stepfather cinema has ever seen, though Deladonchamps literally inhabits the role, as you don’t wish him on anyone, even your worst enemy.

Since they’re constantly kicked out of the house, Jimmy and his brother turn up everywhere, breaking into an abandoned warehouse screaming profanities, seen wandering the streets, the city canals, and the nearby farmer’s orchards in the countryside, where they’re often shooed away for trespassing in areas they’re not supposed to be.  Kevin follows him around, sometimes as a comical sidekick, profanely lambasting his ineptitude as goalie in a local soccer match or wanting to come to a student’s birthday party he wasn’t invited to, which turns out to be a cute girl from Jimmy’s class named Lison (Lola Dubois) living in the luxury of a giant backyard surrounded by gardens and trees, stealing a pair of earrings from his mother (that she never notices missing) to offer as a gift.  Picking up an old racket from the trash, Jimmy spends idle time watching the action on the tennis courts, where he has seen footage of Jimmy Connors play tennis on TV.  When the instructor encourages him to sign up for lessons at 60 euros, this is way beyond anything his family can afford, so he doesn’t even bother to ask for it.  On Sunday’s they visit their grandmother, wishing they could stay with her instead, as she leads a much more calm and sensible lifestyle, but she can’t accommodate them, leaving them stuck in an endless cycle of misery.  While their life would be altogether different without the sinister presence of Duke, the kids can see their mother is brutalized by him, literally beating her into submission in order to pimp her out for sexual favors, as they helplessly see him rewarding her afterwards with flights of heroin, making her more dependent upon him than ever.  Seething with an inner rage, Jimmy tries to stand up to him, but he’s just a kid, where he’s routinely instructed to get lost.  Claudel continually contrasts the incessant brutality with tender moments from an original musical score by Ray LaMontagne reminiscent of the early folk style of Neil Young, or scenes of Jimmy sheltering a baby kitten in the wilds of a nearby bush, or inexplicably getting occasional hugs from his mother. 

Winner of the Gold Hugo for Best Film at the 2015 Chicago International Film Festival, one gets the sense that there’s an improvisatory rhythm to the way the story unfolds, loosely structured with a very matter-of-fact maturity surrounding Jimmy’s perspective, often feeling like an extended series of small incidents that may serve little overall purpose except to highlight his reaction to a variety of circumstances, where he’s often forced to play the adult, seen buying the family’s groceries or allowing his younger brother into bed with him after having a nightmare, but scenes from his classroom suggest he just doesn’t fit, where in a film about childhood what’s surprising is how little time is actually spent in the company of other kids.  These two simply don’t have any friends to speak of, as they’re instead continually left alone to fend for themselves.  Despite the best efforts of his well-meaning teacher (Patrick d’Assumçao), he can’t prevent this kid from falling through the cracks, as there’s literally so support system in place.  A visit from the welfare worker is an infuriating joke, the neighbor next door who can hear and see it all keeps his mouth shut, where the saddest truth about a world besieged by budget cuts is allowing kids like this to fail, where there’s no tutor, extracurricular activity, or the availability to spend quality time with others.  The benefits of learning socialization skills have been replaced by test scores and a reliance on scientific measurements at the expense of helping a child adjust to an often cruel world around them.  This kid is bright and mature beyond his years, but lacks proper guidance, where there’s clearly no indication he has much of a chance to succeed.  It’s a dense and often muddled journey, with literally inspired acting from the two brothers, where you can literally feel the accumulation of time, beautifully shot by Denis Lenoir, the longtime cinematographer for Olivier Assayas, prolonged by a continual series of painterly images accentuated by the bright sunlit colors of the long and lazy days of summer vacation where Jimmy futzes around with nothing to do, as his brother is shipped off to grandmother’s house, where the world is radiantly alive, but he’s simply not a part of it.  The director himself makes an appearance at the end as a tennis instructor, finally allowing Jimmy onto the court once all the lessons are done and there’s otherwise no activity to speak of, adding a personal autobiographical context that at least offers a sliver of hope.