‘One Fine Morning’ sensitively dramatizes conflicting emotions

Especially today, our lives have multiple, at times diametrically opposed features. Navigating ubiquitous, conflicting emotions and challenging demands offers promise of insightful and stirring drama. A case in point is Mia Hansen-Løve’s “One Fine Morning,” starring Léa Seydoux as Sandra balancing raising her eight-year-old daughter, a rekindled passionate affair, her father’s declining health, and her job as a translator.

Thanks to Hansen-Løve’s honest, sensitive writing, this female-driven film brilliantly avoids stereotypical pitfalls that too often feel manufactured and predictable. Through a myriad of events delivered with meticulous observation, Sandra shows the stresses struggling to be a good mom, locating a care facility for her father who has a neurodegenerative disease, and embracing the passion she feels for a married friend who responds in kind. Meantime, Sandra’s holding down a good job, offering her philosophy professor father’s books to deserving students, and somehow accommodating the joy and sorrow, grief and guilt that goes with all this.

At the 2022 Telluride premiere I attended, director Hansen-Løve and actress Léa Seydoux expressed their intimate, personal connections with this story. In fact, Hansen-Løve wrote the script when dealing with her real life’s roller coaster of as depicted in “One Fine Morning.” In the Telluride discussion, she said the film tries “to make sense of what I was going through. I wanted to explore how two opposing feelings—a sense of grief and rebirth—can be in dialogue, and how we can experience them simultaneously.” This is exactly Sandra’s situation as she struggles to balance “grief and great sadness and new love at the same time . . . mourning for someone still alive” while knowing she must embrace “the happiness that is offered . . . This produces guilt,” which Hansen-Løve also wanted to address, discordant psychological states seldom addressed, though so universal and yet difficult to reconcile and accept.

Poignant and perceptive, all the performances, especially by Seydoux, burrow into clashing painful and joyous experiences with which so many individuals can identify in one way or another. It is heartening to observe this astute dramatization with a perfect conclusion. In French with English subtitles at local cinemas. Check listings.