"A quest for life": Mia Hansen-Løve on One Fine Morning

After a metatextual excursion with Bergman Island, writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve takes a more conventional approach with her latest feature, One Fine Morning. Channelling a recent personal tragedy into another masterful, humanist drama, the great French filmmaker is very much back in the mode of Goodbye First Love and Things to Come.

The autobiographical element refers to a neurodegenerative disease that’s taken hold of university professor Georg (Pascal Greggory), prompting daughter Sandra (Léa Seydoux) – a widowed single mother to eight-year-old Linn (Camille Leban Martins) – to try securing a respectable and affordable nursing home place, while also attempting to salvage her father’s immense personal library. During all this, she reencounters an old friend, Clément (Melvil Poupaud), with whom she begins having an affair.

Ahead of One Fine Morning’s UK cinema release, The Skinny caught up with Hansen-Løve on the festival circuit to discuss the film, shooting on celluloid, and trying to make audiences forget they’re watching a movie.

The Skinny: Certain signifiers in One Fine Morning – such as the daughter wanting to see Frozen 2 at the cinema – seem to place the narrative in 2019 specifically. Is that a reflection of when the autobiographical elements happened for you, or a device to get away from having to portray the pandemic in the background?

Mia Hansen-Løve: It had not happened yet when I wrote the film. So far, the only thing the pandemic inspires in me is the desire to turn to period films, to not have to show the world of today. There’s nothing I find uglier than filming people wearing masks. I just can't do it. I know some directors made films they’d written during the pandemic and embedded it in the film – and I admire them, in a way, for that. I couldn’t. For me, the desire of making films has to do with the desire of filming faces.

Do you think sticking with period pieces might make it easier to ensure 35mm film in the budget?

Producers always find a good reason to convince you to not shoot on 35mm. I think I will always have these discussions with them, trying to convince them it makes sense for that film. And that's okay with me. I actually understand why they would think it makes sense to film digital. It's a little bit cheaper and we have to save money when we make films. But for me, working with 35mm is an extension of my language. I believe it creates a softness and poetry in the world it films.

I find it quite hard to not use it. I didn't use it for Eden, but for the rest of my work, I'd rather be using film. [Ingmar] Bergman used digital at the end of his life, but he'd filmed about 60 films on 35mm. So, for him, digital was experimentation. He’d gone beyond what he could do with 35mm. But I still want to explore all the possibilities of that medium.

Casting an internationally well-known veteran like Pascal Greggory for the role of the father – an actor with such a rich onscreen career for many decades – adds another layer to the sadness of the character’s condition. The audience associates that screen presence with earlier roles that embody vitality and eloquence…

I'm glad to hear that from you because I was aware of that too when I asked him to play that part. First of all, I asked him because I admired him a lot, especially in the films of [Eric] Rohmer, the director who's been in my mind forever. Secondly, he looks very much like my father. But then there was also the fact he incarnated in the films of Rohmer, and also in the theatre where he’s been a lot, somebody who’s so eloquent and so much at ease with language. He’s rarely embodied a character that's quite reserved or doesn't speak much.

You don't need to know that to understand the character. But for those who know, it's interesting because it makes you feel the loss even more. That character was inspired by my father, who was a philosophy teacher. He was somebody for whom the clarity of thought and of language was everything. There’s such a tragedy in that loss when you've spent all of your life working on that. It’s so ironic.

When it comes to the progression of time in your films, it seems like so many different elements of life are colliding with one another. Could you speak about the editing for this particular film?

We always try to edit in a way where it feels like you enter a scene that’s already begun, and when you leave, it'll continue. Not only because it brings some rhythm and lightness, but it actually has to do with what I'm trying to do with films. All my films are a quest for life. They're trying to give a feeling of life versus a feeling of cinema.

I think some directors like to create an atmosphere where audiences feel they are in front of the film. And why not, it's just a different relationship to cinema. But I've always tried to make films where people tend to forget they are in front of a film. The illusion I want to create is that they’re in front of life, and that life is bigger than cinema.

Transmitting a feeling of life really defines a lot of my choices: stylistically speaking, when I write, but I also always look for a certain transparency of acting. I never try to get performances so spectacular that people will notice it. I'm trying to get performances that no one will notice; that will be transparent. It’s the same with the editing. I like to edit in a way where you forget it's edited. It’s just flowing.

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One Fine Morning is in UK cinemas from 14 Apr, released by MUBI; certificate 15