One Fine Morning: Lea Seydoux in a tale of two loves

“Lea is the most paradoxical actress I’ve worked with,” the director tells me over Zoom from her home in Paris. “She has made a lot of films, she’s a star, she’s very glamorous, people see her as a very sophisticated actress. But in the end working with her sometimes almost felt like working with a non-professional actor – in a good way. What I mean is she seems to not be self-aware in front of the camera. She has such a minimalist way of acting. She’s not affected, she’s very restrained. Her emotions always seem to be undecided. It’s very impressive, that side of her.”

Seydoux plays Sandra, a translator caught between looking after her young daughter, Linn, and caring for her philosophy professor father Georg. Georg is in the later stages of posterior cortical atrophy, also known as Benson’s Syndrome, a rare degenerative condition which mimics Alzheimer’s Disease but also affects the movement and in particular the sight. Sandra’s mother is divorced from Georg, who has a new partner, though they remain friends. Sandra’s own partner died some years previously. She has a sister with whom she maintains a distant relationship.

Into this sprawling and complicated family situation comes Clément, a cosmologist recently returned from an expedition to the Arctic and an old friend of Sandra’s husband. They meet at a play park, chat, arrange to have dinner. He is married, but unhappily. An affair begins, hesitant at first but then passionate. Meanwhile Sandra tries to negotiate her own feelings about Georg’s illness and, when her mother broaches the issue, to find a suitable nursing home for him.

Léa Seydoux and Melvil Poupaud in One Fine Morning

As ever, the step from fiction to real life is a short one for Hansen-Løve. Her own father, Ole, also suffered from Benson’s Syndrome and died early in the Covid-19 pandemic, around the time she was writing the script. Some scenes in the film were shot in the nursing home he had been in, sometimes in the same rooms he had occupied. Like Georg, he was a philosophy professor and was separated from Hansen-Løve’s mother. And, like Sandra, Hansen-Løve was dealing with his illness while navigating a new love. She spent 15 years in a relationship with fellow film-maker Oliver Assayas and has a daughter with him, but they separated in 2017. She’s now in a relationship with actor Laurent Perreau, and the pair had a son together in 2020, the same year Ole Hansen-Løve died.

The role of Georg goes to Pascal Greggory, little known in the UK but celebrated in France as a veteran of films by New Wave great Éric Rohmer. Melvil Poupaud (above), soon to be seen alongside Johnny Depp in this year’s Cannes Film Festival opener Jeanne Du Barry, plays Clément. It’s probably no coincidence that he bears a striking physical similarity to Laurent Perreau.

“The starting point, as always for my films, was observation of life,” says Hansen-Løve. “In this case having the experience of living two very opposite movements at the same time – grief, some kind of weird grief, and a new happiness and joy – and how it is to experience those very opposite feelings at the same time. There is this neuro generative disease which my father had, and which was part of the inspiration for the film that I wanted to capture cinematographically. Some moments of my relationship to my father when he was sick. But simultaneously some other feelings that have much more to do with happiness. It really was about how both occurred to me at the same time.”

Predictably, given the theme of how and when to place a relative in care, that aspect of the film has struck a chord with audiences.

“I shouldn’t have been surprised because rationally I know how common it is and how so many people have been dealing with these issues,” she says. “That’s also why I thought there was some universality in that story. Even though it looks very autobiographical in a way it’s also very banal because I know that so many people deal with other versions of the same story. But still it’s my eighth film and I’ve never met so many people telling me: ‘This is my story’. It’s consoling to me though I also find it sad to think that so many people deal with that kind of pain.”

Mia Hansen-Løve on set. Picture Judicaël Perrin

Born in 1981 and raised in Paris, Hansen-Løve’s initial foray into film came on the other side of the camera, as an actress. In 1998, while still in her teens, she appeared alongside Mathieu Amalric, Virginie Ledoyen and Alex Descas in Late August, Early September, directed by Oliver Assayas. Two years later she was in another Assayas film, Sentimental Destinies, this time playing opposite Emmanuelle Béart and Isabelle Huppert. She would later cast Huppert in her 2016 film Things To Come, about a middle-aged philosophy teacher who embarks on a journey of self-discovery when her mother dies, and her husband leaves her.

Hansen-Løve made her directorial debut aged 26 with the Cesar-nominated All Is Forgiven in 2007. She followed that with Father Of My Children, which won a Jury Prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. With her fourth work, 2014’s Eden, she turned to her DJ brother Sven for inspiration in a film loosely based on his life in the Parisian house music scene of the 1990s. Among the peripheral characters in Eden are bedroom producers and fellow DJs Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter – better known by their stage name of Daft Punk.

Hansen-Løve’s most recent film, the acclaimed Bergman Island, was her first in English and starred Tim Roth and Vicky Krieps as a film-maker couple undertaking a working retreat on Fårö, the island on which Swedish director Ingmar Bergman had a home. As Bergman’s own films did, it holds up a mirror to a marriage. But among its other themes are female creativity and the pleasures of fantasy and the imagination.

One Fine Morning is a very different proposition. Was the extreme shift in focus a deliberate decision or simply a reflection of what was happening in her life at the time?

“I would say it was both, actually,” she says. “There is one dimension of the writing of the film which really had to do with personal necessity. It’s not a film that I really feel I have chosen, like I chose to write Bergman Island.” At the same time, she adds, “I like the idea that the films respond to one another but are also opposed to one another in some ways. A film will do the job that the previous film could not do.”

With that in mind it’s notable that her next film not only sees return to English but will also mark her first foray into period drama (Eden doesn’t count, she says, when I point out its 1990s setting). And the subject? The finer details are still under wraps, but the plan is for a biopic of sorts about Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley and the author in 1792 of A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman.

Doubtless she will bring to it more than a whiff of the personal.

One Fine Morning is in cinemas from today and will air on streaming platform MUBI from June 16