Trailer for Mia Hansen-Love's One Beautiful Morning (Courtesy of Heart Cinemas)
Once in a while, Hollywood adopts a foreign-made actor or actress, who has already proven their abilities in European productions. Sometimes a guest appearance here and there is satisfied when the American hero visits Paris or Rome, and in other cases the attempt succeeds and leads to a prosperous international career. Leah Sedo belongs to the second type. Early in her professional career, she combined impressive roles in her native France with small roles in Midnight in Paris and Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, and even briefly injured in Inglourious Basterds. Her big break came in the film Blue Is the Warmest Color, which won her a Lumière Award in which she played the blue-haired artist who shakes the life of heroine Adele.
Since then, Sado has appeared in films by Wes Anderson, Yorgos Lanthimos, Xavier Dolan and David Cronenberg, starred in French films such as Saint Laurent, Beauty and the Beast and Diary of a Chambermaid, was cast in the next installment of the Dune films and also did the unbelievable and caused James Bond to abandon the job, at least temporarily, in favor of a stable relationship. She is an incredibly diverse and talented actress, even if she is often cast according to the typecast of a love object or a charming and glamorous muse. In "One Beautiful Day," director Mia Hansen Love's new film that hits screens this week, she does something completely different: the complex and delicate role of a woman caring for her father with a neurodegenerative disease, a beloved philosophy professor who is losing touch with reality. The woman, named Sandra, finds herself coping with his situation on two fronts - bureaucratic and practical, but also emotional. She makes this struggle with her 8-year-old daughter, whom she is raising alone, as well as a friend of her late husband, with whom the relationship blossoms quickly and suddenly despite the fact that he is married.
"I feel like this is the first time I've played just a normal woman. Sandra is a much more grounded character, but of course you can fall in love with her too, no less than other characters I've played," she says in an interview in honor of the film's release. "I love playing characters who have something very natural about them, but also vulnerable and open. The kind that doesn't think about what they look like. We live in a world where actresses have to be very much in control of their looks, with Instagram and the filters, the makeup, the glamour, everything. It feels like you, as a viewer, don't have real access to them. So it's great when you get a movie where you can really relate to the characters, that has something very real and touching about it. The story in 'One Beautiful Morning' is very simple, and its subject matter is sad, but it has a lot of love and I think also light and optimism."
"The first time I played just a normal woman." Sedo (Photo: Courtesy of Heart Cinemas)
The light Sado talks about comes from the small moments that make up most of the story. The plot is built as a sequence of moments from life - her close relationship with her daughter and her partner, past memories of her father and the moments when she rediscovers his character as she got to know him all her life, before the illness. "There's beauty in her daily routine," Sado explains. "It's not a tragic film, it's realistic, and in reality there's a lot of beauty. Aesthetically and emotionally, it's a very exposed film."
How did you feel about the relationship between Sandra and her partner?
"At certain moments I had a very hard time with him, I'm not sure Mia saw how much it affected me. Of course, this is something that is obvious when you are in a relationship like this, where one of the parties is married, but I had a hard time with his suddenness and the feeling that he was abandoning Sandra without any preparation, but it is. And they still have a beautiful bond and they have a lot in common that keeps them close to each other," she says.
"I also loved that the film brings together the side of pain and death with love and passion. She falls in love again while her father is very ill, her life is like a balance of life and death at the same time. It's very beautiful to me."
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"In our world, actresses need to be very much in control of their appearance, with Instagram and filters." Sedo (Photo: GettyImages)
How was working with the director, Mia Hansen Love?
"Mia and I have shared experiences that brought us closer together, and we bonded in a way I hadn't felt before with other directors. She has a certain simplicity as a director and it's important to her that the performances be natural and grounded. She was looking for something very stable that helped her express the emotional depth of this story. The result manages to be very exciting precisely because of its delicacy. For me, to see a film with such depth... It's not something that happens often."
Sandra is the director's character, or at least a version of her.
"Yes, the story is to some extent about her and her father. It comes with a certain extra responsibility. Because I know she experienced all these emotions, it was important for me to be precise and describe them in the most faithful way. She told me a little bit about her father and the connection they had, and it helped me a lot to connect to where the character was written from. I felt that she understood what kind of film she wanted to make, without us having to talk about it explicitly. It was a completely natural process for me."
"The film brings together the side of pain and death and love and passion." Sedo (Photo: Courtesy of Heart Cinemas)
In other cases, Sado notes, the director's intentions in certain scenes or plots remained vague to her even after filming was over. "It's happened to me many times, let's say in a James Bond movie. I wasn't sure how the director expected me to play there. In the final scene of No Time to Die I got into quite a bit of trouble and the director got a little annoyed, he said, 'But it's so obvious!' But it may not have been so clear to the audience either."
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