Lea Seydoux makes from her role as Mrs James Bond into far more sombre territory in One Fine Morning as she does her best to cope with her screen father’s advancing dementia. A once brilliant philosophy professor the degenerative disease gradually reduces him to an inability to recognise people, carry out intelligent conversation and unable to look after himself and in that respect would make it almost impossible to diagnose whether the cast of Made in Chelsea have the disease. As his daughter Sandra Seydoux, a single mum with a young son and unlike the cast of Made in Chelsea is fluent in English and works as a translator. Devoted to her ailing father she has cut herself off from finding love herself instead focussing on finding a care home that can look after her father, Georg (Pascal Gregory)
It’s an understandably depressing prospect for Sandra with her father and with the high costs having to move him from care home to care home each increasingly less appropriate. As she does this she runs into an old friend Clement (Melvil Poupand) a cosmo-chemist – surely another name for ‘drug addled astrologist’ but it turns out that it is a real job! He is married and with a son but he and Sandra hit it off and they are soon having an affair. But with him having to go back to his wife and never make the break there’s an inevitability that, much like her father’s illness, they are doomed. With her father’s memory failing and forgetting who she is Sandra is understandably upset finding solace in Clement who is only too happy to see her.
Sandra is stuck between a rock and a hard place – her father’s condition deteriorating and having to wait on her married lover to visit when he can spare the time and her passive acceptance. The relationship with her father is both engaging and upsetting seeing him being shunted from one home to the next and all seemingly occupied by shuffling zombies like bereft of intelligence in a way not seen since cameras were allowed inside the House of Lords.
Written and directed by Mia Hansen-Love this starts off a little slow but the performances and the scenes become more and more engaging and the three leads are wholly believable. That some might feel the end is perhaps a little vague, it’s the song’ Love will remain’ that leaves this a film that will linger long in the memory
Related feature: Lea Seydoux stars in David Cronenberg’s ‘Crimes of the Future’
related feature: Sam Riley talks ‘She is Love’
Here’s the One Fine Morning trailer…..
