Mia Hansen-Løve's One Fine Morning is now showing exclusively on MUBI from June 16, 2023, in many countries—including the United Kingdom, India, and Turkey—in the series Luminaries.
One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2022).
Legend has it that the art of memory was born from death—when the ceiling of a Thessalian nobleman’s dining hall collapsed and killed all but Simonides of Ceos. He was able to identify his fellow guests, smooshed beyond recognition, by remembering their seat at the table, thus associating each person with a locality. The pre-Socratic poet soon began to experiment with localizing abstract ideas to objects in an imaginary house, which he could pick up one by one—each a symbol of fragmented thought that formed a full memory in aggregate. In the 16th century, King Francis I of France commissioned the construction of an elaborate physical version of Simonide’s phantom house, coined a Theatre of Memory. This arcane nexus of signifiers, a seven-tiered amphitheater with pillars and images that eventually led to texts beneath trapdoors, was only legible to those who knew what each object symbolized.
In Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning (2022), Georg (Pascal Greggory), an aging philosopher, loses such a house of symbols and mirrors—his beloved library, his journals, his miniature car collection—when his family moves him into a nursing home. In these sterile rooms, his surroundings no longer reflect him, which causes his already degenerating memory to steeply decline. Hansen-Løve is perceptive of settings’ effect on their people, of the need to escape home, and of the toll of being uprooted. When interviewed by Julia Solomonoff about her feature debut All Is Forgiven (2007), the writer/director said that when her grandmother took her own life, the rest of the family scattered to Paris from Vienna. Hansen-Løve’s father would, however, warmly recall the airy apartment where he and his siblings grew up before the incident; Paris was, not sad per se, but confined and “austere” for her, in comparison to the Vienna she conjured from others' memories.
In All Is Forgiven, a German wife, Annette (Marie-Christine Friedrich), and a French husband, Victor (Paul Blain), live in Vienna before moving to Paris—an attempt to cure the latter’s career-stunting lassitude. Or so they say to each other; in fact, they both know Victor is struggling with drug addiction. But in Paris, his condition worsens. This is the structure of nearly every Hansen-Løve film: again and again people leave Paris until the city calls them back. Lovers are divided by space and by their maturities failing to align in time. Maya (2018) marks a divergence from this structure: a war reporter/hostage survivor travels to India, and does not return to Paris by the end of the film. Stuck on the Baltic Sea isle of Fårö, Bergman Island (2021) is the only film that she shot totally outside of France, while her latest, One Fine Morning, is the only film that she shot totally inside of Paris, which, in her interview with Screen Slate’s Jihane Bousfiha, she calls a potential “act of self-punishment.”
Hansen-Løve shoots all her films on location rather than on a stage, sometimes in old haunts, or in spaces inspired by real ones. Before she can write a script, she decides the chronology of the locations, which form the apparent structure of each film. Her films carry traces of her presence—“my presence and the people around me,” as she put it in her talk with Solomonoff. This is especially true of One Fine Morning, which is based on the time she spent with her father as Benson’s Syndrome (a rare variant of Alzheimer’s) ate away at his health, memory, and ability to read and write. She shot in the actual nursing homes her father lived in, used her father’s books as prominent props and set dressing, and referenced recordings of her father's speech to write Georg’s dialogue.
As Hansen-Løve puts her personal life in open discussion with her films, there’s a profound valence to her observations about locations as receptacles of memory, which can be destroyed, and of suicide, a motif that lingers in her films’ empty spaces. These insights keep me close to the work despite its nihilism sometimes pushing me away—her unbudging conviction that nothing really changes, which remains despite her relentless yearning for renewed perspective. For Hansen-Løve, one can only escape their material circumstances to see, with the advantage of distance, that they must eventually return, or experience more or less the same conditions somewhere else. Real freedom—in Hansen-Løve’s view, a kind of realpolitik freedom—requires surrendering to the current condition but finding individual liberation within it. Her middle and upper-middle-class white Parisians can coast on that and the concessions people on the fringes have squeezed from the center. This surrendering to the present, which reviewers often conflate with the work being present (see many variations of “time conquers all in a Hansen-Løve film”), does, however, allow her to discern with resonance some of the smaller beauties and tragedies of the material world in which we live.
Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2022).
I should explain the nihilism, which I feel is undeniable in full view of the work. Very early into Hansen-Løve’s 2016 film Things to Come, Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert), a philosophy teacher, shoves through a picket line in front of the school. After yanking some of her own students from the line, who are vaguely protesting for educational reform—Hansen-Løve reduces protestors, activists, and anarchists dialogue to platitudes that feel strange against her otherwise naturalistic dialogue—she reads Rousseau to a half-empty class: “If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited for men.” That’s Hansen-Løve’s attitude in sum when strikes only impede her characters’ otherwise seamless travel; in The Father of My Children (2009), a striking film crew is a producer’s cross to bear, and in Goodbye First Love (2011), a strike interrupts the protagonist’s flight to meet her paramour in Marseille. Any aspirational activist or leftist character is made the butt of admittedly funny jokes. In One Fine Morning, Françoise (Nicole Garcia), Georg’s ex-wife, part of a non-violent ecologist group, overstates the danger of an action she participated in to remove a portrait of Macron in City Hall. In fact, they were welcomed “with open arms,” but forgot the screwdriver needed to remove the portrait. In the end, as her husband reveals with rolling eyes, she voted for Macron. To which she replies, “You can be for and against at the same time. It’s complex. You wouldn’t understand.”
Though she pulls the lowest-hanging fruits, Hansen-Løve ultimately shows affection for characters like Françoise, who, as played by Nicole Garcia, subtly suggests she’s in on the joke, on herself, without ruining it. As with everything else, the director roots politics in location. Late into Things to Come, the reactionary Nathalie takes refuge in an anarchist commune in the Vercors Massif mountains. “Can you escape the concept of disaster with your politics intact?” a nondescript anarchist asks. They enjoy an alternative lifestyle in the mountains, but Hansen-Løve is certain Paris will call them back soon enough. For her, leftist politics or ambitions for better conditions are like a summer home you come back from. “I’m too old for radicality, I’ve been there,” Nathalie says with a smirk. Such nihilism is also evident in some of Hansen-Løve’s happy endings, wherein her attempt to find beauty in the way things are feels too comfortable with the interpersonal circumstances of patriarchy and empire. Maya ends happily, for example, with a 30-year old-white war reporter—having recuperated from a hostage situation by vacationing to India and romancing a teenage girl—heading to Jordan to report again in “the real world,” with vim.
In Hansen-Løve’s third feature, Goodbye First Love, a young couple, Sebastian (Sebastian Urzendowsky) and Camille (Lola Créton), escape to a summer home in the countryside (somewhere between Haute-Loire and Ardeche, where the director’s grandmother once resided), for less political reasons. Sebastian is about to embark on a ten-month journey to South America, not to meet girls, he assures Camille, but “to do something good, to work, to become a real person.” She tracks his place on a map with a tack until he writes a letter with his intention to forget her: “Not much remains of what we thought we said.” She gets the Jean Seberg haircut he would never allow (Hansen-Løve’s way of cuing that time has passed), moves into her college dorm, and majors in architecture. She falls fast for one of her professors, Lorenz (Magne-Håvard Brekke), and soon moves into his flat. When Sebastian suddenly returns to Paris, he and Camille stay the night in an unfinished building that she and Lorenz are designing. This is just a reckless rehearsal—eventually, Sebastian is sleeping with Camille in Lorenz’s apartment while the homeowner is away. Then the dynamic, and thus the locations, flip: Camille brings Lorenz to her family’s home in the countryside, where she made her last happy memories with Sebastian. The film ends with a gust of wind lifting up a straw hat, which Sebastian left in the house at the beginning, and hurling it into a creek. As the naive relationship depressed them both, Camille’s memory of him hopefully drifts with the hat downstream.
Hansen-Løve never shoots establishing wide shots of locations. We receive them in motion, as characters snake through interiors and exteriors in medium and medium close-up shots that accrue a fuller notion of the space. Once, in One Fine Morning, she shows the full height of an apartment, tilting from its foundation to the roof. But she still doesn’t give it to us all at once. And she has an affinity for showing her characters’ commutes. There are numerous long takes wherein characters seamlessly transition from one actual location to another. That can apparently be revelatory in the time of, say, mainstream content like Marvel’s Black Widow (which Hansen-Løve was offered), or the Apple TV+ series Pachinko. When I spoke with the latter’s location manager and production designer, they explained to me how a single scene from the series was shot in “20 different locations [and sound stages] in 10 different cities,” to create a Frankenstein’s monster of, they hope, plentiful invisible sutures. On the other hand, Hansen-Løve’s characters are always on the go, moving through more or less genuinely connected spaces. This authentic connective tissue creates intimacy between character and location, which always share the frame.
The Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2009).
In The Father of My Children and One Fine Morning, characters move through or linger in places newly void of their primary dwellers. About a third of the way into the former, the ostensible main character, an independent film producer who is based on the late Humbert Balsan, Grégoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), shoots himself mid-walk in broad daylight. The multi-phone-juggling career man doesn’t stop even to—stop. He leaves behind a wife and two daughters, films he produced that no one else believed in, and insurmountable debt. His production company, Moon Films, had become like a second, or arguably primary, home for him (he often slept on the couch across from his desk), which his family hardly saw. As shareholders liquidate the company—displacing filing cabinets full of decades of work—the kids rummage through their father’s office, unsure what to make of his other life’s accoutrements. Later, Clémence (Alice de Lencquesaing), the oldest daughter, rifles through her father’s letters, which she can’t fully decipher in his absence. The family also revisits a Knights Templar church in the countryside that Grégoire brought them to before he passed away, but it feels empty without him there to retell its story. His wife Sylvia (Chiara Caselli) ties up his unfinished business, flowing between the Moon Films productions that are in flux or still in progress. Together they turn over the pieces that Grégoire left behind, not always able to make out his reflection from the other side.
This external liquidation of Grégoire’s memory mirrors the internal degradation of Georg’s in One Fine Morning. Both are paralleled in the dissemination of the men’s places and objects. In The Father of My Children, the memories imbued in Grégoire’s things are illegible to his family. To dress the sets in One Fine Morning, Hansen-Løve re-gathered her father’s book collection to fill Georg’s shelves, an act of retroactive preservation on film. Georg’s daughter, Sandra (Léa Seydoux), says her father’s library “is more him than the person at the nursing home.” She feels closer to the books; the man is merely a “bodily envelope.” His vinyl collection reminds her of him too, but when she plays him Schubert, he says, “It’s no longer for me. Too laden.” With memories? She wonders. And he confirms.
Because One Fine Morning is anchored to characters who are losing their memory and mobility, this is the first of the director’s films to slow down, allowing viewers to immerse themselves deeper into the settings. When Sandra sparks a love affair with an old friend, Clément (Melvil Poupaud), his arrival kicks the film into Hansen-Løve’s usual speed, which relieves Sandra from the sometimes stifling responsibilities of caretaking for her father. Gradually, Hansen-Løve makes the contrast between her time with both men more pronounced. The director and her frequent editor, Marion Mannier, shed their connective tissue between locations, and the slowness that once allowed us to settle into them, as her characters lose grasp of old memories and cling to new ones. She cuts directly from the father comprehending his losses to the lover barreling through Sandra’s door with two hours to spare. From Georg inscrutably telling his daughter he wants to “sleep the length of a short film: ten minutes but a few meters longer. And afterward you won’t tend to me anymore,” to Sandra sliding her hand over to Clément’s side of the bed and waking up when she realizes he’s no longer there.
Hansen-Løve then ends the film on a freeze frame, but of a motion—after Clément helps Sandra pinpoint their home in the skyline visible from the Sacré-Coeur. He places his hand on her shoulder, situating Sandra where her home fits in the grander scheme of the city. The shot looks like a classic family photograph. A memory is captured, or their continuity slightly realigns, in the instant they regather their place and footing. King Francis I’s likely unfinished Theatre of Memory would have served a limited function as a mnemonic device for himself, and become obsolete in his passing. But while playing with her own memories on film, Hansen-Løve also preserves them, in a way, because she has made their feeling and sense of place so legible and navigable for an audience.
One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2022).