Julian (Seeking Film)’s review published on Letterboxd:
Mia Hansen-Løve constructs her stories like she’s transcribing a laidback Sunday afternoon into film form. It’s the kind of Sunday afternoon where you go for a walk, visit your parents, and maybe get some last-minute work done between naps and casual extramarital affairs. With a title like “One Fine Morning,” you would expect Hansen-Løve to keep up that Sunday afternoon (morning) vibe, but while these unhurried quotidian activities do make up the bulk of its runtime, this mundane schedule also happens to include frequent, heartbreaking visits with a mentally deteriorating loved one.
One Fine Morning rises and falls with the pair of understated performances of Léa Seydoux and Pascal Greggory, who infuse this sadly commonplace situation with endless empathy. But it’s Hansen-Løve who maps out the slow and inevitable tragedy, with her typically purposeful lack of embellishment and focus on mundanity carrying you through this situation in what feels like real-time. When we enter the scenario, Seydoux is already well on the way towards this undesirable conclusion, but the staid approach with which the director presents what’s left gives us the sensation that we’ve been there since the beginning.
It’s not all doom and gloom with One Fine Morning, however, as Hansen-Love’s reverence for the everyday manifests in just as many moments of heart melting as heart breaking. Yet again, we find an artist who knows how to write and direct children to be precocious but not unbearable (that’s TWO in one day…?), while other moments of levity come across as a breath of fresh Sunday morning air amid the darker implications of this situation. (Watching this at Cannes felt especially like a smart idea, as seeing One Fine Morning with a full, mostly French house made for an abundance of laugh-out-loud moments that had the theatre roaring. Doubt I’d have gotten that same experience if I’d waited to see this in a theatre back in Montreal with about 7 other people around.)
One Fine Morning may not boast the kind of bold, auteurist vision that dominates film (and film festival) discourse, but Mia Hansen-Løve shows once again that there’s strong emotional value in taking a step back and observing life with a naked eye.
Cannes 2022.
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