One Fine Morning

Filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love has often excelled at telling a humanist story.

Seydoux is always worth watching even with the unbecoming, cropped hairstyle she adopts here.

The film achieves intimacy, rather than mere arousal. That’s just one of the ways in which it offers a certain grandeur.

The irony of being intimately connected while desperately lonely can be a hard one to digest. Yet director Mia Hansen-Løve prods at the concept with the same tenderness that she applies to all her films.

Hansen-Løve hits a career high note, delivering a quietly thoughtful and ultimately life-affirming portrait of the strange interaction between loss and rebirth. It’s a miraculous balancing act that pretty much took my breath away.

One Fine Morning is a response to the battle that her own father and philosophy professor, Ole Hansen-Love, faced with Alzheimer’s disease.

But it's mainly down to the strong performances of Poupaud and especially Seydoux, whose performance captures life's complications and contradictions.

Happily, this heartfelt film from Mia Hansen-Løve offers something of a ray of hope in its story of a widowed single mum, her relationship with a married scientist, and the stresses she faces managing the welfare of her mentally declining father.

To date, One Fine Morning is her most gentle and moving demonstration of the tools and methods required to do this...

It's a subject matter that will resonate with a lot of viewers, and Hansen-Løve treats it with her usual gaze of empathy without sentimentality.