Mereghetti’s report card: Léa’s tormented life due to her father’s suffering (score: 6/7)- Corriere.it

throughout his career Mia Hansen-Løve seems to want to play between fiction and autofiction, ready to read her own life and that of her loved ones in a cinema that tries to dilute the role of time to favor a kind of suspension daily continuity. “The Father of My Children” (2009) closely resembled that of the producer who was supposed to finance his first film, “Eden” (2014) was inspired by the figure of his brother DJ, “Things to Come” (2016) to the teacher mother e “On Bergman’s Island” (2021) was conspicuously affected by his love story with the director Olivier Assayas (closed during the tormented shooting of the film).

With this “One fine morning»the director places the figure of a father (of her father) at the center of the film, in some way reconnecting with her debut film «Tout est pardonn»é (2007). George (Pascal Greggory) is a father marked by a neurovegetative disease (Benson’s syndrome) which is taking away his sight and at the same time his balance and sense of direction: we discover this through behavior and the relationship with daughter Sandra (Léa Seydoux) who tries to make their commitments coexist single mother and of translator and interpreter with those of daughter. She is the center of the film, the axis around which the direction organizes everything but not to dig into her psychology how much to use it as a kind of magnet, of North Star around which the other characters in the film are organized and given visibility.

The progressive loss of autonomy di Georg thus brings his ex-wife Françoise (Nicole Garcia) into the picture, too much hasty (“we’ve been separated for twenty years” she tells a doctor who would like her to be more participatory), the new partner Leïla (Fejria Deliba) whose health conditions do not allow her toconstant assistancethe other daughter Elodie (Sarah Le Picard) apparently in tow of Sandra’s initiatives: many different ways of interpreting conjugal love And branch that the director tells and observes how from afaralmost entomologically.

Mia Hansen-Løve does not hide the tiredness of Sandra (which were probably hers in the face of the slow fading of the parent) and neither the little selfishness of her ten-year-old daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins), whose Bergmanian name (her name is Linn the daughter that the Swedish director had from Ullman) is a further piece of that “film autobiography” that the director has entrusted to her works (her last film took place entirely on the island of Farø, in Sweden, inside and outside the Ingmar Bergman house). Yet Hansen-Løve’s film never delves into the possible causes of those moodsrather it just logs i behaviors.

Likewise Clément’s entry into the film (Melvil Poupaud)the astrochemical friend who awakens in Sandra la erotic passion is told in the succession of events that accompany a adulterous relationship (he is married with a son) rather than in introspection or in the exaltation of passionate conflicts. The withheld and distant interpretation takes care of it glamorous of Seydoux to make it clear what is stirring inside her, as if Sandra felt guilty for having in love just as the father was dying.

It’s just this sort of dualism between the death of a loved one and the birth of a new love, between the desire to tell a story central figure like his father’s (I’m from the real parent le diary sentences performed by Greggory’s voice-over as Sandra takes the meter; I’m always hers flickering writing that we see on the pages of a notebook) and the discovery and acceptance of one’s own “selfishness”it is just that contrast between death and life to form the heart of the film, the one that explains the objectivity of the gaze and at the same time the need not to get too many guilt feelings, not to close oneself off from the possible love that could arise. But together it is also the limitthe inevitable brake that the truth of life (and of autofiction) puts on the invention of cinema and its possibilities of transfigure reality.