‘One Fine Morning’ Review: A Marvelous Léa Seydoux Illuminates Mia Hansen-Løve’s New Drama [Cannes]

Bergman Island’s writer-director, Mia Hansen-Løve, was herself in a relationship with an older film-maker, Olivier Assayas – and the story starts to feel like a refracting prism in its overlap of characters and creator. In the hands of Hansen-Løve, it’s a delicate millefeuille, layering story upon story, character upon character, until it’s hard to peel them apart.

David Cronenberg’s new film “Crimes Of The Future” asks its audience to go on quite a journey to the dystopian future. The film’s most quotable line, “surgery is the new sex,” only scratches the surface.

The stars of Crimes Of The Future gather up for the premiere of the film at Walter Reade Theater on Thursday (June 2) in New York City.

French actress Léa Seydoux is having a big moment right now at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Not only is she set to star in the latest film from director David Cronenberg, “Crimes Of The Future” (read our review), but she is also the lead in Mia Hansen-Løve’s “One Fine Morning” (read our review) But there is another project she is opening up about that she almost did.

“The Stars at Noon” finds the French filmmaker Claire Denis shooting in Panama doubling for Nicaragua; directing a cast of Yanks, Brits, and assorted Central Americans; and working from a script switching between Spanish and English. Internationally coproduced Towers of Babel such as this aren’t at all uncommon at the Cannes Film Festival, but the errors in translation all over this disappointing foreign-relations drama run deeper than simple differences of ethnicity or language.

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentStarring Léa Seydoux,  Mia Hansen-Løve’s “One Fine Morning” won this year’s Europa Cinemas Cannes Label for best European film at the 2022 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.Announced Thursday by Europa Cinemas, ahead of the closing ceremony this evening, the prize is one of two at Directors Fortnight, and awarded by one of the sidebar’s partners given the section is non-competitive.A second partner plaudit, the SACD Prize, handed out by France’s Writers’ Guild,  will be announced later today at an awards ceremony.“One Fine Morning” was always a frontrunner for a prize at Directors’ Fortnight, though never a shoo-in. The award comes just three days after Sony Pictures Classics announced it had acquired North American, Latin American and Middle East rights to the film.

In the late 19th century, two French psychiatrists coined the term “folie à deux,” literally translated as madness for two, to describe what is now widely referred to as shared psychotic disorder, or when two — or more — people transmit delusional beliefs and occasional hallucinations to one another. The condition is most common in people closely related, who live in intimate proximity, and has been lengthily dissected by academics.

EXCLUSIVE: Bobby Lee (And Just Like That…) has signed on to star alongside Justina Machado, Will Sasso, Gregg Sulkin and Michelle Randolph in Mario Garcia’s feature directorial debut, The Throwback, which is currently in production in the Tampa Bay area.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticMost filmmakers who want to unsettle you in a horror movie will reach for a familiar set of tools: slashers, demons, shock cuts, soundtracks that go boom! in the night. But in “Crimes of the Future,” the writer-director David Cronenberg is out to provoke and disturb us with something far more traumatic than mere monsters.Am I talking about the fact that in the distant future where the film is set, human beings grow mysterious new organs in their bodies? Or that having those organs removed through surgery has become, for a creepy rebel aesthete named Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), a species of performance art? Or that people no longer experience physical pain, and will therefore stand in the street late at night cutting each other for cheap thrills, as if they were shooting heroin in a back alley? Or that surgery itself, as someone puts it, has become “the new sex”? If you see “Crimes of the Future,” you’ll witness all of these outrages, and a few more besides.

review out of the festival praised Hansen-Løve’s attention to detail in depicting the challenges of ushering a loved one through an illness of someone near the end of his life. “With ‘One Fine Morning,’ Hansen-Løve turns her attention, and ours, toward the challenges, both tiny and immense, of loving someone through a decline such as this — one that’s not a death, just yet, but rather a disabling event, an experience that is as perplexing for Georg as it is for his family and former students,” Katie Walsh wrote for TheWrap.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentSony Pictures Classics has nabbed “One Fine Morning,” Mia Hansen-Love’s critically acclaimed drama starring Lea Seydoux at Cannes on the heels of its world premiere at Directors’ Fortnight. Les Films du Losange, the indie film powerhouse, has now sold the film in 50 territories.The deal is for North American, Latin American and Middle East rights to the film.

Cannes Film Festival on Sunday.  The French actress, 36, looked stunning in a black, blue and white striped short sleeved T-shirt which she paired with the black trousers.  The star added some height to her frame in a pair of towering black pointed toe heels as she attended the event in the Campari Lounge at the Palais des Festivals.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentMia Hansen-Løve, the French writer-director whose last film “Bergman Island” competed at last year’s Cannes, is back at the festival with “One Fine Morning,” a romance drama headlined by Lea Seydoux. The movie world premiered at Directors’ Fortnight and has earned stellar reviews with Variety‘s Guy Lodge describing it as a “wistful, wandering character study” and “gently moving reflection on parenting one’s children and parents at once,” which marks Hansen-Løve’s “returns to French, and to form.” “One Fine Morning” stars Seydoux as a long-single mother who’s coping with her father’s degenerative illness while embarking on a new, uncertain romance with a charming, yet emotionally unavailable man (Melvil Poupaud).

A silver spoon clunks loudly inside a bowl of beef broth. The meal — well, barely a meal — is served to Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Vicky Krieps) twice a day, her diet a strict combination of insipid soup and wafer-thin slices of lemon.

After she ascended to the Competition last year with Bergman Island, it’s bittersweet to see Mia Hansen-Løve back in the ranks of Directors’ Fortnight. On the one hand, it’s a testament to her versatility that she can switch back and forth so adeptly, but at the same time, it’s a little galling to see women’s stories apparently banished from the Official Selection when so many bromances make the cut every year. That’s not to say that One Fine Morning has anything radical to offer — the story of a single mother falling in love with her late husband’s (married) friend, it won’t win any prizes for advancing the feminist cause — but it does offer a very thoughtful character sketch, composed around what might be a career-best role for underused Bond star Léa Seydoux.

“Bait,” British filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s breakout feature, could well be considered a horror movie. Set in a quaint little fishing enclave off the Cornish coast, where the ship decks are rickety and the townhouses’ whitewash ever-peeling, the knotty fear of loss is ever-present: of history, of possession, of tradition, of heritage, of liberty.

Throughout her career, Mia Hansen-Løve has returned to a familiar milieu — the daily lives of women, drawing out a poignant beauty and humanist sense of drama in the quotidian rhythms of mothers as they go about their work, as well as their caretaking of children, parents and their own inner worlds. There’s something fascinating, and indeed feminist, about simply watching these women, played by some of Europe’s most talented actresses (Isabelle Huppert in “Things to Come,” Vicky Krieps in “Bergman Island”), simply exist in the world, maintaining the delicate balance of day-to-day harmony despite the larger ups and downs that threaten to upend everything.In “One Fine Morning,” Hansen-Løve’s latest, the woman in question is Sandra, played by Léa Seydoux, hair cropped into a pixie cut, clad in the jeans, sweatshirt and backpack befitting a young widowed mother caring for her daughter, Linn (Camille Leban Martins), on her own in Paris.