Films that feature a son or daughter looking after a loved one such as a parent are a bit hit-and-miss. They can be a bit melodramatic at times. One Fine Morning takes a long time to get to the point of the story. Along the way, there are some other things that get in the way of the main story. Lea Seydoux commands the screen though with every scene she’s in. The film keys on her performance but it’s not enough to make this a great film.
Sandra (Lea Seydoux) is a translator but she also takes care of her sick father Georg Kienzler (Pascal Gregory); he has Benson’s disease, a neurogenetic disease that causes blindness. She is also a single mother of Linn (Camille Leban Martins) She’s a smart and curious young girl. While working at a conference she meets Clement (Melvil Poupaud), an astrophysicist. They begin a tumultuous love affair. Even though he is married with a child of his own and she has other problems she had to deal with.
Part of the difficulty of this story is how the father of the main character keeps getting moved around from hospital to hospital. Even though this film takes place in France it’s a problem a lot of people can relate to. The medical field tends to throw away elderly people who can’t help themselves or don’t have money to pay for the care they need. This man’s disease is incurable so nobody wants to help him. It’s a shame because everyone deserves proper care until their last breath.
As I’ve mentioned this is a French film but it has subtitles in English. For a lot of people, this can be a difficult aspect of watching movies. Not too many people in America like to read a movie. Add in the length of this film and you have a long experience for most people. Unfortunately for me, it does drag in the middle when the lead character deals with all the stuff involving her father. If the movie focused more on the relationship I think it would have flowed better and not felt as long.
As the film is set in France it does show a lot of the city it takes place in. The scenery is pretty cool to look at. As I’ve never been to France so to see the city streets and landscapes was nice.Seydoux’s character does a lot of walking around and that’s a way to get these aspects of the movie. The editing needed some work though. With this film feeling long on the tooth maybe it needed to be cut a little. Also, the daughter character could have been explored more.
One Fine Morning is a good film that deals with some difficult subject matter a lot of people can relate to. The main focus is this aspect of the film. If the movie focused more on the relationship aspect and the mother daughter elements I think it would have flowed better and wouldn’t have seemed as long. Even though it’s short of two hours in length. The story was good but the main reason to see this film is Lea Seydoux who owns every scene she’s in.
3 stars
Dan Skip Allen
From the Fourth Row! 