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SYNOPSIS
With a father suffering from neurodegenerative disease, a young woman lives with her eight-year-old daughter. While struggling to secure a decent nursing home, she runs into an unavailable friend with whom she embarks on an affair. |
"In a Q&A at the 60th New York Film Festival, Hansen-Løve delved into the driving force behind her filmmaking, expressing a deep-seated urge to share untold stories. Her commitment to writing her own scripts is evident, a process she describes as arduous, yet indispensable in fully confronting her emotions and reaching the core of what she hopes to communicate to her audiences. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Hansen-Løve reflects on the impact of her parents, both philosophy professors, whose relentless pursuit of truth has deeply influenced her approach to writing and directing films. Embracing this ethos, Hansen-Løve’s filmography, consisting of eight features, unabashedly draws from moments in her own life, embodying the spirit of autofiction.
During the creation of Un beau matin, Hansen-Løve found herself caring for her elderly father, Ole Hansen-Løve, while also beginning a new relationship. This parallel mirrors the film’s storyline, where Léa Seydoux plays Sandra, a Parisian translator who flits from her role as caretaker to her father, diagnosed with Benson’s syndrome—a rare neurodegenerative disease—to her roles as a mother and lover. The film became a way for Hansen-Løve to memorialize her father’s story and retain his presence in cinematic form. She aimed to capture the “simultaneity of extremely opposite feelings,” as she states: “One was very painful, and one was certainly complicated but happy. And I made that observation: how much it helped that I was in love to overcome—or to cope with—the experience of seeing my father slowly dying.” With this, she sheds light on the coexistence of phenomena that often occur in life. And as we shall see with Un beau matin, it neither only speaks to disease, nor to love, grief, or joy, but rather gives a holistic, dynamic, and authentic glimpse into one’s full life—leaving one with a certain sense of peace, which I believe to be one of the film’s most touching qualities.
You’ll find yourself in the sterility of nursing homes and hospitals, then go back out into the dappled sunlight of summer in Paris, only to be swept right back into the bleakness of winter again—Hansen-Løve’s film is about the seasonal motions we inevitably go through, treating all of these spaces and temporalities with equal weight and attention. Exclusively shot on film, a stylistic choice Hansen-Løve has maintained in all her works, you will surely experience its effect of producing a special warmth, softness, and soul throughout the film."
(from the introduction to the film by Anaïs Shen, undergraduate concentrating in French & Francophone Studies and East Asian Studies)