by James Mottram
“For me, there are two kinds of scripts,” says filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve. “There are the ones that I want to write and the ones that I have to write.”
In the case of her new film, One Fine Morning, it was very much the latter. The story was partly inspired by her own father, who suffered from a rare degenerative disorder named Benson’s Syndrome. “It’s a quest for me, making films,” she adds, when FilmInk meets her in Cannes. “So, it was part of the quest that I had to deal with this illness and try to find a meaning out of it.”
Hansen-Løve is certainly not afraid of ploughing her own life for filmmaking. Her second film, Father of my Children (2009) was based around the suicide of French actor/producer Humbert Balsan, a mentor figure for her. Eden (2014), all set on the clubbing scene, was loosely inspired by her brother Sven. And Things To Come (2016), which won Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival, was partly based on her mother, an academic. Still, there’s something about One Fine Morning that truly cuts close to the bone.
The film stars Léa Seydoux as Sandra, a single mother and Parisian-based translator who must tend to her ailing father Georg (Pascal Greggory). Like Hansen-Løve’s own father, Georg is a former philosophy professor suffering from Benson’s Syndrome, an unusual form of dementia that causes failure of mind, vision and memory. “This illness is extremely cruel,” says Hansen-Løve. “And it would be for anybody, of course, but…it took my father at such an early age, and when he was somebody who spent all his life thinking and dedicated to books, I found it actually tragic.”
Hansen-Løve’s father Ole died during the early part of the pandemic, just as his daughter finished the screenplay. It was a script that set out to encapsulate his last years. “It’s this moment I tried to capture…when he was still able to see himself and he knew what was going to happen to him,” she explains. “He could see himself drowning, basically, and you couldn’t help him.”
In search of catharsis, Hansen-Løve recreated things with real fidelity. “The books that you see in the film were the books of my father,” she explains. “I used the film as a chance to get them back from the basement where some of them still were and get them sent to the place where they could find a home. And I think it’s a very nice way of showing you the kind of connections film and life can have. I always paid a lot of importance to the books in my films actually. I’m often disturbed by the ‘fake-ness’ of libraries in films. Maybe because I’m a daughter of teachers… I am very sensitive to this.”
Decorating the set with her father’s books was one thing, but Hansen-Løve also visited actual locations where events took place. “In order to make this film, I went back to the hospitals where my father was. Sometimes I shot in the very same room where he was. That made me cry at some points. But I needed to do that in order to go behind it… it wasn’t because I wanted to torture myself. But it was because I knew these places. I knew these rooms. I knew these corridors.”
Admittedly, there was a practical reason for this also, with the film shot during COVID. “The fact that my father had been staying in these places helped me open the doors of these places, because people still remember him. And some of them were sensitive to the fact that I was making a film related to this story. And I think in the time of COVID, where all the hospitals were closed – and it was really very, very complicated to get in the hospitals, or nursing homes – it gave me some kind of legitimacy that actually helped me a lot.”
Intriguingly, the film arrives shortly after Gaspar Noé’s split-screen tale Vortex, another frank look at dementia, which was inspired by his mother’s decline. “I do think that cinema seems to be more ready now to make this difficult topic part of what we can make film about,” she says. “It’s like the reverse of [something] glamorous basically. And it’s maybe something that a lot of people don’t want to see on screen but now more people are ready to look at this as being also part of the world and the legitimate part of what cinema could be about.”
While One Fine Morning might sound grim, it’s quite the opposite. Just as Sandra is watching her father slip away, she finds herself amid a new romance with Clément (Melvil Poupaud), an old friend, showing that love can spring even in the darkest of moments. “To me, the love story [has] as much importance, and is as intimate,” says Hansen-Løve. “And the fact that I made a film trying to show the link between both is a consolation for me, because it helped me maybe understand more about my own life and some moments in life.”
As a young woman, Hansen-Løve appeared in both Olivier Assayas’ Late August, Early September (1998) and Les Destinées sentimentales (2000), and later became embroiled in a long-term relationship with Assayas (they split seven years ago but share a teenager daughter). The New York Times recently stated: “You might liken them to the American filmmaking partners Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.” Now 42, she lives in the suburbs of Paris with filmmaker Laurent Perreau (L’insurgée) and their children.
Yet Hansen-Løve is keen to underline that One Fine Morning isn’t simply autobiographical. “At the end, it’s not me, it’s still a fiction, and I don’t see myself when I see Léa in the film. I see Sandra,” she says. “It’s a character who is some kind of encounter between Léa and I, and it’s this reinvention, this displacement from somewhere in yourself and it goes from yourself and it goes somewhere else. And at the end, it’s another object. And this transposition – and this transformation – brings so much liberation, I find.”
One Fine Morning is in cinemas on June 8, 2023
