One Fine Morning (2022)

Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

One Fine Morning tells the story of Sandra (Lea Seydoux), a widow living with her daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins) in a tiny apartment in Paris. Her long forgotten love life is one day reanimated, as she meets Clément (Melvil Poupaud), a former friend of her late husband, just as her father (Pascal Greggory) has to be admitted into a permanent care facility. 

The movie is a quiet meditation on life and death, on getting older and on missed opportunities. Sandra's father, a renowned philosophy professor suffers from a neurodegenerative disease robbing him of his precious mind and memories. Although he always wanted to write a memoir, he never was able to overcome his procrastination, until it was too late. Now, a shell of the person he once was, blind and untethered, he wanders the halls of the care facility calling out for his lover, who is ever present in his mind, but suspiciously absent from the movie.  

Sandra, a translator and interpreter, meanwhile resigned herself to a life of perpetual in-betweenness. Between languages, life and death, youth and adulthood, love and despair. Her days are filled with stillness, long silences and words unspoken. Only by watching her father wither away and his indecisiveness in life haunt him to a point, where he starts to shy away from any memories, purposely forgetting his daughters and past life, does she understand that life is only worth living, when it is concrete and physical with all its exuberant joy and deep sadness.

Lea Seydoux delivers a subtle, but intense performance of a woman deathly afraid of life and Pascal Greggory brings a touching vulnerability to his character, delivering some of the most powerful scenes in the movie.  

All in all, I feel like I'm missing a couple of decades of life experience to fully comprehend or appreciate this movie. Armed with a powerful message about attachment, memories and death, it sorely lacks an emotional core. The characters feel detached and even in its most passionate moments the movie feels like a still image.