Hi, folks. This newsletter’s been dormant for a while -- but I’ve finally finished the run of my show Live to Tell. It was also my 44th birthday last week. As I start a new chapter, I’ve set the intention to write shorter essays every couple of weeks about things I’m thinking and experiencing these days. This is the first, inspired by the last film I saw. Hope I can keep it up, and hope you enjoy. – Brian x
When I need a cultural cleanse, there’s nothing like popping into the cinema for a thoughtful, artful film about bourgeois Frenchwomen experiencing emotions. For me, if it’s distributed by Les Films du Losange, it’s most likely gonna hit a sweet spot that is simultaneously quiet and deep. A few years ago, Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come (L’avenir), featuring a surprisingly gentle Isabelle Huppert as a new divorcée, did that. Now the director is back with Léa Seydoux in One Fine Morning (Un beau matin), which opened a few weeks ago in UK cinemas and is also streaming on MUBI.
Wherever she goes in this film, Seydoux’s character Sandra carries a worn, not especially fashionable backpack. Though she is an adult woman, a mother and, in fact, a widow, this particular prop makes her seem younger, an eternal student. The backpack has no real plot significance, but I found myself clocking it in scene after scene. Backpack people recognise each other.
The film’s story has to do with Sandra negotiating a new romance with an old friend and coping with her father’s ailing health. What first drew me in, though, was its rhythm, which I would call ‘compartmentalised freelance.’
In the early scenes, we glean that Sandra’s a translator. We see her at a desk with her Larousse dictionary open, but then she’s off to pick up her daughter up from school, and then doing simultaneous interpreting at some boring conference on aviation, then climbing the stairs to the flat of her ailing Dad. The editing is not frenetic, but each short scene feels pointedly disconnected. In one very quick cut, we leave behind her Paris routine altogether: she’s on the Normandy beaches and we’re not sure why. Oh, she’s got a gig translating at a D-Day commemoration event. Then leading elderly US veterans around a Calvados distillery. Then back to Paris.
On any given day, you’ll also find me traveling avec backpack. In it: a roll of flipchart paper, marker pens, a Bluetooth speaker, various chargers, multiple notebooks, scripts, a bottle of Huel, gym clothes, bicycle lights. The list goes on. There’s a jigsaw quality to my days, weeks. And so you carry items for any eventuality – whilst also toting around the mental chronogram of unrelated jobs, lesson plans, appointments and obligations.
Even as I felt pangs of personal empathy for Sandra’s jumbled life, I felt aesthetic bliss to be out to be at a movie after weeks and weeks consuming television. This story was gonna give me a full sense of life – and still be less than two hours long!
Almost everything we watch on streaming today, even the good stuff, would’ve been a movie in the 90s. I get consistently restless around episode four, tired of the padded out exposition, repeated dynamics that underline points and subplots for every side character.
Not so this French film. Hansen-Løve sketches in Sandra’s life subliminally, with blissful economy. We work to catch up on backstory. Wait, OK, her parents are divorced but they still hang out? Oh, I guess her husband died. How long ago? It’s not a mystery, but it is a jigsaw, like real life. Hansen-Løve never underlines how “stressed” Sandra must be, overburdened as she juggles her obligations. But of course she is. And when she encounters old friend Melvil Poupaud, it’s clear that one of the things that most appeals about an affair with him is the brief oasis of “me-time” it offers.
After extended flirting, the liaison finally kicks off when he invites her to visit his office, which hardly seems romantic. But it is very stable setting: a place where he shows up daily to chitchat with the same jaded colleague and run experiments on the same scientific equipment… Meanwhile, Sandra’s Dad has to move out of his flat and trundle through a series of hospitals and nursing homes in search of a suitable resting place. Sandra shuttles between each of these, as well as her jobs and her daughter’s fencing matches, whilst finding windows for brief trysts. She arranges for her father’s books to be divided up amongst his ex-students. Is it any wonder that when she and her lover finally get some time together with the daughter off to summer camp, all Sandra wants to do is stay at home eating, sleeping, fucking? Why go out to an exhibition when you can experience the bliss of remaining in one place?
I’ve been making a conscious effort recently to leave the house with just my jacket, when I can. One of the stickiest ideas from my high school English curriculum is an ominous one from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: an individual going along the road of life lugs along all their material possessions, a large colonial house with four bedrooms, furniture, provisions, books, papers, knicknacks. By urging us to leave all that behind, Thoreau was the Marie Kondo of the 19th century. A millennium earlier, Jesus provoked the Rich Young Man with the very same imperative.
Without my backpack, of course, I’m freer. Unburdened. In theory, my spine should be able to relax, expand. But I’m not used to it yet.
I don’t know exactly what’s in Sandra’s backpack but I’ll bet the items provide comfort as life keeps asking her to give things up – her father’s home, his books, and eventually his mind. At her young age, she’s also a widow (though the movie strikingly never explains how or how long ago). When you’ve already lost someone so close to you, abandonment feels familiar but still not comfortable. Holding onto a few items offers a sense of preparedness but that is an illusion. Her Dad’s situation is a preview of the ultimate divestment awaiting us all. His notebooks have dwindled to scribbles and he has no more interest in his Schubert CDs. Amidst all this loss, Sandra will decide that taking a chance on a relatively unreliable lover is good enough company, for now.
A propos of its title, the film ends on a lovely day in Montmartre, looking out over Paris as the characters point toward home. They situate themselves in time and place, for one fine morning, at least. Enjoy the moment but don’t hold on too tightly.