by Cláudio Alves

Autofiction is not a recent phenomenon, whether in film or other arts. Nevertheless, increasingly directors are dipping their toes into pools of navel-gazing introspection. For some auteurs, nevertheless, there has never been one other way of creating art. Take Mia Hasen-Løve for instance. Her cinema has at all times manifested as a mirrored image of lived experience, pulling from personal details in gradations of openness, extrapolating narrative honesty as a conduit for constructing humanistic pieces. Empathy is the tenet of her cinema, not only between audience and characters but between the filmmaker and her creation. A minimum of, that is the sensation that persists after one leaves the theater, still dazed by the director’s work. 

Inside this context, it means an important deal to state that One Superb Morning, Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest, is perhaps her most personal project up to now…

If one desired to be highly systematic, perchance a bit limited and even cold, it’s possible to categorize this film because the director’s ode to her father in an analogous manner that past works felt connected to other relationships. Reading interviews and following Hansen-Løve’s profession, one comes to acknowledge her DJ brother in Eden, her Philosophy teacher mother in Things to Come, and her erstwhile filmmaker partner in Bergman Island. These stories usually are not direct representations of real-life, just refractions of it within the wonderland of cinema, rhyming ideas echoing from work to work. Unmoored people attempting to catch their breath as life unfolds are a continuing, time’s cruelties providing violent shake-ups while the pain of absence is a background ache.

But after all, amid the despondence, there’s at all times hope. Anyone’s time on earth is a combination of tonalities reasonably than one monotonal thing. Balancing sorrow and joy, heavy hearts with a lightweight fluttering, the director captures the complexity of being alive, each the mundane and the poetic parts of it. Furthermore, her characters feel like entities who branch out beyond these narrative framings, their day-to-day existence shaped by the anti-narrative aimlessness of reality. All these facets are present on this One Superb Morning, the memoirist themes mentioned before, along with the thematical stones forming the inspiration for this particular personal oeuvre.

Ungenerous viewers may accuse the director of traveling through a well-trodden path, verging on repetition. Nonetheless, that might be too reductive a reading. If nothing else, the characterizations are so specific to this work as to sustain and justify Hansen-Løve’s approach. Our protagonist is Sandra, a young widow and single mother who works as a interpreter in Paris, negotiating different facets of her life because the film unravels before her. Indeed, two stories intertwine in One Superb Morning, neatly separated until the ultimate moments if you happen to ignore the melancholic connective tissue bringing them together from the start. Notably, each thread centers on Sandra’s relationship with a person – her father on the one hand and her lover on the opposite.

Georg is dying, succumbing to a degenerative disease that, in half a decade, turned him from a charismatic teacher right into a man who can scarcely handle himself. Sandra helps where she will be able to, as does a network of other family members, nevertheless it’s not enough. Slowly, premature dementia is erasing the person, abandoning what looks as if a confused hollowness until sparks of lucidity bring back memories of what once was. For somebody who has endured similar experiences in my life, watching as relations fade away though their body continues to be present, Sandra’s relationship along with her father proved to be a devastating experience.

So many moments ring true, from small domestic rituals to the growing gulf between people, feelings of paralyzing powerlessness within the face of ineffable forces. As Parisian summers give in to winters spent far-off, a picaresque journey through care facilities delivers the gentlest of gut punches until all that is left to do is the sensible matter of separating old possessions and emptying an apartment that is not a house. In a single profound interaction, Sandra muses about how her father’s sprawling book collection is a greater manifestation of him than the person himself, for, within the objects, one can grasp the mind mostly gone.

One other look into totemic items uncovers a notebook imbued with Georg’s pain, his situation poignantly expressed in pages of crescent chaos. Yet one more moment finds the patriarch recoiling from the past in a way antithetical to Sandra’s treasuring of physical remembrance. When she plays a few of his favorite CDs, he’s almost frightened, for they’re too laden with memories, which only brings about frustration with the current. Returning home on an evening bus, those words still storm inside Sandra’s head, invisible storms that turn into visible as her face breaks apart in tears. Perhaps she’s just lost in grief, and perhaps she’s asking herself tough questions. Is it selfish to mourn the daddy you remember while he’s still here, dying but alive for now and present in his own way? Perhaps – Sandra isn’t someone unmarked by selfish wants, in spite of everything.

That is the opposite thread weaved through the film’s tapestry, a reckless affair with an old friend, now married to a different woman we never see. Mia Hansen-Løve refuses to guage the characters or fall into moral didacticism. As a substitute, she allows their complicated humanity to shine on-screen, ugliness holding hands with beauty, reason caught in an embrace with folly. At the top of the day, everyone’s just trying to seek out happiness, be it a long-term serenity or a momentary respite from immediate aches. Their feelings are valid, their bruised souls dictating editing patterns that privileged aborted moments and quick transitions, cascading emotions in swift cuts. Marion Monnier’s work is exemplary, but so is Denis Lenoir’s lensing, filled with Rohmerian touches in its seasonal imagery, color stories and soft light.

Still, if I were to pick out MVPs from inside this film’s team of superlative artists, the acting ensemble can be where to look. Nicole Garcia is a dream as Sandra’s mother and Georg’s ex-wife, finding tenderness in a no-nonsense attitude that sometimes leans acerbic. Melvil Poupaud is a captivating figure of contradicting desires because the married paramour. At the identical time, Pascal Greggory delivers a disconcerting portrayal of somebody that is like a drawing within the strategy of being erased. Finally, there’s Léa Seydoux in what could possibly be called the perfect work of her profession. From starting to finish, she’s miraculous, finding infinite ways of articulating Sandra’s personhood, from peaks of carnal euphoria to dark valleys of grief. Even if you happen to’re not a fan of Mia Hansen-Løve’s cinema or find this particular story inconsequent, you owe it to yourself to witness Seydoux’s subtle genius.

One Superb Morning is currently in theaters, having fun with a one-week limited release by Sony Pictures Classics.