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A decrepit body and a mind damaged by old age and a neurodegenerative disease manage to connect with a piece by Schubert that plays in a small hospital room.
The sounds of a life manage to connect the deterioration of the spirit and the decay of the body with a high point of the past, those of art, emotion and memory, and the man who no longer looks or hears or feels, hums his melody and even she cheers up with an attempt to dance.
However, shortly after, he gives up and asks his daughter to cut the music.
"Too much memories…".
The sequence seems the symbol of the complete work of his director, the magnificent Mia Hansen-Løve.
A cinema of memory, of her memory, of her existence and those of her family and her friends, with whom she maintains a faithful and direct relationship, but at the same time modest because she never exceeds the sentimentality,
One beautiful morning,
his latest work, inspired by the illness of his father, a philosophy professor, is a work of light on the darkness, happy on the end of days, calm on the vertigo of contemporary times.
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Mia Hansen-Løve, the autofiction film that talks about love and death
The humanism of his cinema, the flight from the melodramatic despite dealing with stories that can lead to it and the absence of bombast in the staging stand out once again in Una bonita mañana
,
presented at last year's Directors' Fortnight in Cannes.
Two main plots come together in the script.
The first, that of the old philosophy professor, obsessed throughout his life with clarity and rigor, who has had to struggle in recent times with the certainty that he no longer even controls spaces.
The uncertain end: “How do you die of this disease?” His daughter asks the doctors.
The second, that of that widowed mother with a young daughter, who begins a loving and adulterous relationship with a married man with children.
Everything wobbles in her future.
Three troubled generations amidst the shifting sands that the days sometimes become, without knowing what will become of them almost a while later.
In
All is Forgiven
(2007) he was inspired by what happened to a cousin of his and the relationship with his father.
In
The Father of My Children
(2009) he focused on the dramatic death of his film producer.
In
First Love (Un amour de jeunesse)
(2011), in his own experiences.
In
Eden
(2014), in the professional success of his brother's DJ and his fall into drugs.
In
El porvenir
(2016), in her parents, philosophy teachers.
And on
Bergman's Island
(2021), in her own cinematographic experience and in her relationship with Olivier Assayas, her ex-partner and father of her daughter.
Hansen-Løve has always said that she is not inventive enough to concoct out of thin air.
So autofiction dominates her entire career.
Also in
A beautiful morning.
But for us, the viewers, that doesn't matter.
The essential thing is that there are exciting conflicts, complex relationships and an open struggle to tell about our existence.
His, of course, but transcending ours.
Touching fibers.
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Suicide, one of his great themes, comes out once again.
Of course, also adultery, the true nature of love and the feeling of never being able to stop seeing another person and loving them, no matter how much someone forbids it to themselves.
And the legacy, always the legacy.
Books and memory: culture, personal and intellectual crises.
A way to go through this world and leave it in peace and harmony.
Despite everything, the inalienable color of the good and simple moments, those that will leave behind.
The hope that, in the face of absence and loss, there are also reunions, the need to survive and the future of contemporary women.
Like hers, whether it's Hansen-Løve's or that of the alter ego played with immense verve by Léa Seydoux, sometimes embarrassed, but always tender and talented,
ready for a beautiful morning of light, accompanied by the best that there is in life.
And, above all, accompanied by calm with herself.
a nice morning
Directed by:
Mia Hansen-Love.
Cast:
Léa Seydoux, Melvil Poupaud, Pascal Greggory, Nicole Garcia.
Genre:
drama.
France, 2022.
Duration:
112 minutes.
Premiere: March 31.
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