Léa Seydoux is sublime in Mia Hansen-Løve’s deeply personal family drama about the upheavals and unexpected joys of everyday life.

Sandra (Seydoux) leads a subdued, self-contained existence in bustling Paris. Widowed five years earlier, she juggles work as a translator with raising her eight-year-old daughter and looking after her father, who has a neurodegenerative condition that is causing blindness and delusions. As she struggles to find a suitable care facility for him, Sandra runs into an old friend of her husband’s, the unhappily married Clément, and begins to let go of her past.

One Fine Morning premiered as part of the Directors’ Fortnight program at Cannes, where it won the Europa Cinemas Label for Best European Film. Dabbling in partial autobiography as she has always done, Hansen-Løve (Bergman Island, originally slated for MIFF 2021; Things to Come, MIFF 2016) once again locates great empathy and humanity in the messy spaces of life. Her sensitive, resolutely unsentimental writing and direction allows Seydoux to shine alongside co-stars Pascal Greggory and Melvil Poupaud, in a performance of extraordinary warmth and feeling as a lonely woman who discovers that loss can offer its own kind of rebirth.

“Seydoux is transcendent, carrying a sadness inside which proves incredibly moving when the opportunity for love presents itself and she melts into it.” – Screen Daily