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Sandra’s (Léa Seydoux) days don’t vary much. She’s been a single mom to her precocious young daughter (Camille Leban Martins) for five years now; a widow, she’s made peace, too, with romantic possibility being a relic of the past. She works very successfully as a translator, often tapped for important conferences and summits where she flits easily between languages. And when she has free time, she takes turns with her family members caring for her father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), a philosopher who has been for some time battling the effects of a worsening degenerative illness robbing him of his memory and other simple bodily functions.

One Fine Morning, Mia Hansen-Løve’s poignant, finely drawn new movie, introduces us to Sandra just before the life she’s grown accustomed to is thrown for the kind of loop that can only engender a new normal. Georg’s illness is escalating even more rapidly than Sandra or anyone else in her family had prepared for; it is now suddenly, or at least feels that way, the time to start looking for assisted-living facilities, a search made especially stressful by limited finances. And, early in the movie, Sandra bumps into Clément (Melvil Poupaud), an old friend of her husband. After realizing just how much she likes him, she starts an affair with him. Sandra doesn’t want to accept the truth of losing her father, something made additionally painful because he so recently was still the same man obsessed “with clarity and rigor.” Getting rid of his prodigious collection of books feels like abandoning a family member; his engagement with them alone makes them feel like body parts. Sandra also would rather not accept that this relationship with Clément, with whom she only continues to fall deeper in love, is probably untenable, considering he’s married, has a young son, and, though unopposed to professing love for Sandra, is prone to deciding that he’s going to stay with his family after all. 

Read the full review on South Sound.