Review: Léa Seydoux shines in 'One Fine Morning,' capturing the passion and emotion of a Parisian woman's surprisingly normal life

The events depicted in “One Fine Morning” are shockingly normal — a woman raising her daughter, dealing with her ailing father, embarking on an affair — but they’re captured with such narrative precision and emotional depth by writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve and her leading lady, Léa Seydoux, that the result is radiant.

Seydoux — known to American audiences as the doomed lover of the last James Bond movies, or the prison guard who distracts Benicio Del Toro in “The French Dispatch” — plays Sandra Kienzler, who lives a good life in Paris. She raises her 8-year-old daughter, Linn (Camille Leban Martins), and works as an interpreter.

Sandra picked up her love of languages from her father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), a retired professor of philosophy — particularly versed in the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Georg’s retirement, we’re told, was forced upon him because he was diagnosed with a degenerative neural condition, posterior cortical atrophy (also called Benson’s syndrome), which makes it increasingly difficult for him to make sense of what his eyes are telling his brain.

Sandra works with her mother, Françoise (Nicole Garcia) — who has been divorced from Georg for 20 years — and her sister, Elodie (Sarah Le Picard), to figure out a nursing home arrangement for Georg. (Turns out France’s health care system is nearly as heartless as ours, except that theirs is largely paid for.) They also must deal with Georg’s belongings, including a mountain of books accumulated over a lifetime of feeding his mind.

While all this is happening, Sandra encounters Clément (Melvil Poupaud), a “cosmo-chemist” who was a good friend of Sandra’s late husband. Their dormant friendship rekindles, and soon erupts into a passionate romance. The complication is that Clément is married and has a son, who is one of Linn’s classmates.

Hansen-Løve, coming off the intricately devised narrative of “Bergman Island,” lets her characters and viewers breathe in the spaces of Sandra’s life — her small but cozy apartment, the Parisian pocket parks where she takes Linn, even the succession of hospital rooms and nursing homes where Georg is moved. It’s fascinating that only toward the end is there even a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower, because Hansen-Løve is depicting Paris as Parisians experience it, not as a tourist destination.

Those places help illuminate Sandra’s life, as she navigates romance, desire, motherhood and the impending slow-motion grief from watching her father’s slow decline. Seydoux navigates those emotions brilliantly and bravely, never afraid to display Sandra’s heart out in the open. “One Fine Morning” shows a life being lived, and lived well, even as she’s working through some of the hardest moments of it.

——

‘One Fine Morning’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 3, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some sexuality, nudity and language. Running time: 112 minutes; in French with subtitles.