One Fine Morning (2022, Mia Hansen-Løve) (Patreon)

60/100

A film you'd guess is autobiographical even if you weren't aware that mining her own life tends to be Hansen-Løve's thing—the details are too precise for pure fiction, the anecdotal shapelessness too maddening. Surprisingly ordinary in its broad strokes, as Seydoux's Sandra copes with the commonplace travails of being a single mom, caring for an ailing parent, and having an on-again-off-again affair with a married man; that last element is especially familiar, barely deviating at all from the standard waiting-for-him-to-leave-his-wife template. But I laughed at the recurring argument about who kissed whom first, and at the daughter cracking up when she jumps into Mom's bed and discovers Clément there, and at Sandra's childish tantrum when Clément expresses a desire to do something with her other than just nonstop fucking. She's an admirably prickly protagonist, unwilling even to pretend that she enjoyed a movie her daughter loved; it takes some guts to depict your onscreen avatar eventually feeling so hopeless about her father's condition that she just leaves him wandering the halls of his care facility, knowing that her help would last only for a moment. (Dad's scenes benefit—to put it a touch insensitively, given that I believe this befell Hansen-Løve's actual father—from his having a comparatively rare neurodegenerative disease, Benson's syndrome, which is Alzheimer-esque but distinct from it in several arresting ways. Pascal Greggory's casually heartbreaking performance, which suggests someone forever in a benign state of shock, doesn't hurt either.) With a stronger ending, this would have been my favorite of her films overall*, despite its lack of ambition; I can see what she's trying to do with the final shot, viz. retroactively collect all of the film's threads beneath the conceptual umbrella of "home," but it didn't quite feel earned. 

* Albeit a distant second to Father of My Children's electrifying first half. Still hoping to see that director again sometime.