One Fine Morning: A Simple Life Ballad

Release Date：Dec/9/2022

Genre：Drama/Romance

Director：Mia Hansen-Løve

Cast：Léa Seydoux、Pascal Greggory、Melvil Poupaud、Nicole Garcia

Viola's Rating：7.9

Life is beautiful, but life can be challenging and difficult at the same time. One fine morning could be the silver lining of someone’s desperate life. French director and screenwriter, Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest feature film, One Fine Morning, tells a simple, touching story of life. The British, French and German coproduction was released limited on Dec 9, 2022.

Inspired by the director’s personal experience, the plot of this romantic drama is mainly about a young woman, Sandra (Lea Seydoux), living with her eight-year-old daughter, Linn, with a father suffering from neurodegenerative disease. While struggling to secure a decent nursing home for her father, Sandra runs into a friend, Clement, and embarks an affair with him although he is a married man.

Throughout the film, language plays a critical role. Sandra’s father, Georg, was a philosophy professor, who loves literature and poetry. Carrying on her father’s legacy, Sandra becomes a translator/interpreter. During her work, she can express fluently, but when it comes to her love for her father, she is reserved.

Losing a beloved family member is something everyone is going to experience sooner or later, but going through the process is painful, and for people with moral standards, it’s not easy to accept the fact to be a mistress. One Fine Morning is a story of loss, including the fading of a well-loved parent and a romantic heartbreak.

As the theme song, Love Will Remain by Bill Fay, sings, even if Georg doesn’t remember Sandra in the future, all the memories in the past will remain; even if Sandra and Clement’s relationship doesn’t have a good ending due to his marriage situation, their love will remain. Also, even though Sandra’s mother divorced Georg long time ago, she still takes care of him, and of course, Georg’s love with his partner, Leila, will definitely remain no matter what happens in the future.

Sandra plays three different roles in One Fine Morning, a daughter, a mistress and a mother. She demonstrates what daily struggles a female in Paris would encounter in the modern world. Although Sandra has a sister to share the burden of taking care of Georg with her, this kind of responsibility is what children will face when parents get old. As a single mom, Sandra tries very hard to give Linn a wonderful life, and even though being a mistress isn’t a great role model for Linn, seeing the interaction with Clement and Linn, audience gets to feel the simple happiness in these three people’s hearts.

One Fine Morning is a ballad of daily life with a very emotional, honest and moving tone. It provides a subtle power with award-winning Lea Seydoux’s solid performance. We all are very familiar with the everyday bittersweet, but we might never have the chance to look at it and consider it as such a beautiful moment.

Picture Credit: IMDb