Review: Fleeting joys in the sublime ‘One Fine Morning’

Like most issues, the title of Mia Hansen-Løve’s “One Advantageous Morning” sounds higher in French.

“Un Beau Matin” doesn’t have that very same rom-commy ring. But it surely’s type of good to think about a moviegoer, anticipating a Hallmark film, strolling as a substitute into Hansen-Løve’s sublimely melancholic drama concerning the ineffable impermanence of life.

For anybody, although, there’s a wistful, heat feeling when wandering right into a Hansen-Løve movie. Hers are delicate dramas keenly tuned to the rhythm of each day life, and “One Advantageous Morning” is her most radiant movie but.

Sandra (Léa Seydoux) is a Parisian single mom with a younger daughter, Linn (Camille Leban Martins), and a father, Georg (tenderly performed by Pascal Greggory), whose reminiscence goes as a consequence of Benson’s syndrome. As Sandra and her mom (Nicole Garcia), lengthy divorced from Georg, make preparations for him to enter a nursing dwelling, a dormant a part of Sandra’s life (Linn’s father died 5 years earlier) is rekindled by an sudden romance with an previous buddy, Clément (Melvil Poupaud).

Although “One Advantageous Morning” sways between youth and previous age, sensuality and incapacity, it’s not a neat dichotomy. Hansen-Løve’s movie, which first moved moviegoers ultimately 12 months’s Cannes Movie Pageant and which arrives in theaters Friday, is extra gracefully involved with the fidelity of loss. Family members come and go, painfully; each the more and more disoriented Georg and Clément, unhappily married however not separated, are there one second and gone the subsequent. Within the movie’s first scene, Georg fumbles with the lock to his entrance door, whereas Sandra waits on the opposite facet, attempting to information him.

Hansen-Løve, who additionally wrote the script, is a dedicated naturalist whose tales construct with the regular accumulation of quotidian element and shift with the sudden undulations of relationships. As in the perfect of her movies however extra so, “One Advantageous Morning” gathers a transferring poignancy with out you ever realizing it. One second, you would possibly really feel as if the narrative focus is drifting or sliding into repetition; the subsequent, you’ll be able to hardly think about a extra cohesive and affecting encapsulation of bittersweet human truths.

A lot of that’s owed to the tender efficiency by a never-better Seydoux. For an actress able to such glamour, it’s a powerfully unadorned efficiency, crammed with pleasure and unhappiness, usually on the similar time. Scenes of “One Advantageous Morning” toggle between hospital wards and Sandra’s residence. Seydoux performs the head-spinning back-and-forth between love affair and aged care with calm composure and occasional eruptions of emotion.

Phrases, we sense, are fading. One of many duties of Sandra and her mom is to type by way of the intensive library of her father, a former philosophy professor. The heaps of books are a type of bodily manifestation of what Georg — described earlier than his downturn as obsessive about readability and rigor — is shedding and forsaking. Sandra, herself a translator, grows more and more conscious that the identical destiny, inevitably is hers. But when to like is to lose, it’s a cut price price making — for a “beau matin” and extra. On this achingly luminous drama drawn from the acquainted stuff of each day life, it’s a nurse who places it most succinctly: “Take advantage of being collectively.”

“One Advantageous Morning,” a Sony Footage Classics launch, is rated R by the Movement Image Affiliation of America for some sexuality, nudity and language. In French with subtitles. Operating time: 112 minutes. Three and a half stars out of 4.

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Observe AP Movie Author Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP