One Fine Morning recounts an affecting story of love and loss

Reading Time: 4 minutes

One Fine Morning is a delicate story of human relationships and their complexities, and of watching people disappear before your eyes. Director Mia Hansen-Løve is no stranger to Australian audiences and is known for her films Things to Come, AFFFF 2017, Eden, AFFFF 2015, Goodbye First Love, AFFFF 2012 (which she came to Australia to promote), and Bergman Island released in 2021.

One Fine Morning

The central character in the film is Sandra, portrayed authentically by Léa Seydoux (who is familiar to both French and English speaking audiences (Oh mercy!/Roubaix, une lumière from AFFFF 2020 and The French Dispatch released late last year)). Life isn’t easy. She’s a widowed single mother to daughter Linn, and performing mentally taxing work an interpreter. It’s refreshing (and rare) to see Léa Seydoux looking so naturalistic in a film wearing jeans and little make-up for much of One Fine Morning.

 

Sandra’s father, Georg is convincingly played by Pascal Greggory (La vie en rose/La môme, 2007 and The Page Turner/ La Tourneuse de pages, AFFFF 2007). He was until recently a philosophy professor and has a degenerative neurological condition affecting his eyesight, memory and understanding of his surroundings. Every time he appears on screen, we feel his anguish and confusion. He is disappearing before her eyes, she is having to mourn him before he has passed.

© Palace Films

 

Sandra’s mother, Françoise, is played by Nicole Garcia (who you may recognise from the Netflix series Lupin, dans l’ombre de l’Arsène, and the film Who You Think I Am/Celle que vous croyez, AFFFF 2019). She’s long-divorced from Sandra’s father and is finding a new zest for life through non-violent protest. She pushes Sandra to accept that Georg needs to be moved into care.

 

For Sandra, a pleasant distraction comes with the reappearance of an old friend Clément, played by Melvil Poupaud (Brother and Sister/Frère et Sœur film this year’s AFFFF, The Young Lovers/Les Jeunes Amants from AFFFF 2022, and Summer 85/Été 85 from AFFFF 2021) and the two quickly start a passionate relationship. However, that isn’t easy either because he’s married with a child.

 

One Fine Morning drifts between distress and joy. Distress comes from the fallout of her father’s debilitating and progressive illness, whether it be visiting facility after facility in search of one fitting for her father, packing up his apartment and being overwhelmed at the idea of losing his library (in which she finds more of her father than in the man himself), and she finds joy in her moments with Clément.

One Fine Morning/ Un beau matin
©Palace Films

Mia Hansen-Løve’s films often treat difficult, realistic subject matters and particularly loss. One Fine Morning is no different; it looks at the ways in which we deal with ageing and the deteriorating health of our parents. As always, Mia Hansen-Løve handles these sensitive matters with delicacy.

 

Her films are also often somewhat inspired by her own lived experience and this is also the case in One Fine Morning. She explained that the film was partly inspired “by my father’s illness while he was still alive. I was trying to make sense of what I was going through. And I wanted to explore how two opposing feelings, a sense of grief and rebirth, can dialogue, experiencing them simultaneously”.

 

Some scenes are shot in quite unique ways, which add something special to the film. In a scene in which Sandra is dreaming, rather than seeing just the image of her asleep or the imagery of the dream, the dream plays out over the shot of her sleeping. A scene in which Linn goes to visit her great-grandmother appears almost documentary-like when the great-grandmother is talking on screen about her ailments and her life.

 

One Fine Morning is a poignant, touching film of love and loss and of managing human relationships. It was the winner of the Cannes Film Festival 2022, Best European Film (Directors Fortnight). It was released in France in October 2022 and made its Australian debut at the Alliance Française French Film Festival 2023. It will be released by Palace Films in Australia this week on 8 June 2023.

4 CROISSANTS

Matilda Marseillaise attended a media preview screening of One Fine Morning.

Three other films from the AFFFF have since been released: The Innocent, November, and Saint Omer.

 

You may also like read our other reviews of AFFFF films:

A good Doctor delivers a dose of hilarity in the unexpected

Country Cabaret: a fun farm film to see at AFFFF 2023

Everybody Loves Jeanne: a funny and touching exploration of our inner thoughts and overcoming grief

Final Cut: a comedic zombie film that’s even for people who don’t like horror or gore

Happy 50 – THIS FILM IS ALSO BEING RELEASED ON 8 JUNE 2023

Jack Mimoun and the Secrets of Val Verde is a fun adventure

Lie With Me

In On the wandering paths, Jean Dujardin takes the path less travelled

Paris Memories

Ride Above is an inspiring, but predictable, film about finding the courage to ride again

Silver Rockers: a film inspired by the story of rocker retirees from Normandy

Sugar and Stars: an inspiring tale about the road to sweet success THIS FILM IS BEING RELEASED IN LATE JULY 2023

The Colours of Fire: an heiress seeks revenge

The Origin of Evil is a must-see film this AFFFF – THIS FILM IS BEING RELEASED in MID 2023

The Tasting is a film with depth and elegance

Umami is a feature film that should have been a short

For events with links to France, French language and culture and the francophonie happening in Australia this month, check out our What’s on in June.

 

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ACMI’s Goddess exhibition honours women of all colours, sexualities and nationalities

Reading Time: 3 minutes

What does a 1906 French short film by Alice Guy-Blaché have in common with Josephine Baker and Marlene Dietrich? They’re being honoured in the exhibition Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion (Goddess exhibition) being held at the Australian Centre of the Moving Image in Melbourne until 1 October 2023.

Goddess exhibition
ACMI’s Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion, photo by Eugene Hyland

The Goddess exhibition celebrates the women and gender-transcending superstars who shaped their own roles, took creative control and fought a system that tried to exploit them. It does so through moments from over 120 years of moving image history highlighting iconic stories, characters and moments.

 

The exhibition includes never-before-seen costumes, original sketches, interactive experiences and cinematic treasures, including iconic outfits worn by Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Geena Davis and Margot Robbie. The women featured in the Goddess exhibition are far more than the bombshells, starlets or screen siren stereotypes that were used to undermine them.

Goddess exhibition
ACMI’s Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion, photo by Eugene Hyland

French links in the Goddess exhibition include a 1906 French short film Les Résultats du féminisme (Consequences of Feminism), from Alice Guy-Blaché. A gender-bending comedy which sees men raising the kids, ironing and sewing while women smoke, drink and prey upon the ‘weaker sex’ with lurid advances. The short film addresses the fears about feminism not being about euality but about waging war on men. It playfully suggests that men wouldn’t tolerate being treated the way women are so why should they expect women to.

 

French Légion d’honneur awarded Marlene Dietrich is also celebrated in the Goddess exhibition, with pieces worn by her on show. These include

  • patent leather and silk grosgrain ribbon Delman Tuxedo pumps, kindly provided for the exhibition by the FIDM Museum at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandizing, Los Angeles; and
  • 14ct gold and ruby cufflinks from Marlene Dietrich’s personal wardrobe courtesy of Deutsche Kinemathek – Marlene Dietrich.

 

Marlene Dietrich made her own path and courted controversy for doing so. The first lesbian kiss in cinema wearing a tuxedo was by Marlene Dietrich. She was reprimanded in Paris for wearing trousers. A flyer from the Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong in Shanghai Express film is on show at the Goddess exhibition.

Goddess exhibition/ exposition Goddess
ACMI’s Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion, photo by Eugene Hyland

Another woman embraced by the French is Josephine Baker who Goddess celebrates for weaponizing glamour. Baker was the first African American woman lead in a feature film, Sirens of the Tropics (1927). Though the film and Baker’s ‘banana dance’ conjured White colonial fantasies, her performances parodied the sexualisation of Black women.

 

Baker was also a war hero for the French Resistance. When Germany invaded France in World War II, Baker weaponised her glamour to defend her adopted home. After spying on German officers, she smuggled top-secret messages in her underwear unsuspected. Back in America, she wouldn’t perform for segregated audiences and was the only woman who spoke alongside Martin Luther King Jr in the 1963 March on Washington.

 

The Goddess exhibition includes sketches for Josephine Baker’s stage costumes Eric De Juan, 1949 (courtesy of Fashion Institute of Technology SUNY, FIT Library Unit of Special Collections and College Archives), and an exhibition print by Michael Ochs, 1951.

 

The Goddess exhibition is an ode to be a boundary-breaking, glass-ceiling smashing women and is on at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image until the beginning of October 2023.

 

 

KEY INFO FOR GODDESS EXHIBITION

WHAT: Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion exhibition

WHERE: Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Gallery 4, Lower Ground, Federation Square, Melbourne

WHEN: 5 April – 1 October 2023

HOW: Purchase your Goddess exhibition tickets via the ACMI website: https://www.acmi.net.au/whats-on/goddess/

HOW MUCH: Ticket prices are as follows:

  • Full price: $25
  • Concession: $24
  • ACMI Member: $22
  • Family (2 adults + 2 kids): $65
  • Child (4–15 yrs): $15
  • Group (6+): $22 per person
  • Flexi: $35

Goddess exhibition