One Fine Morning aka Un Beau Matin

Clément, daughter Linn and Sandra lean over a gate

The latest report on Mia Hansen-Løve’s mission to keep alive a style of intimate, undemonstrative French cinema, One Fine Morning (Un Beau Matin) stars a highly impressive Léa Seydoux in a role that’s a world away from 007 glamour. Hansen-Løve is the daughter of philosophy professors and so in Seydoux’s Sandra Kienzler there’s every temptation to read-across from reality to fiction, particularly if you know that a) Hansen-Løve often draws from her own life, and b) she wrote the screenplay while her father was dying from Benson’s syndrome, a degenerative disease, which is exactly what Sandra’s father, a philosophy professor, is suffering from here. The film opens with Sandra (a shorn, dressed-down Seydoux) … Read more

Broken English

Parker Posey and Melvil Poupaud in Broken English

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 25 August Paris liberated, 1944 On this day in 1944 the German garrison in Paris surrendered and Paris was liberated, after a battle lasting six days. It had started with an uprising by the French Resistance on 19 August, who were augmented by General de Gaulle’s Free French Army of Liberation and Third Army troops under General Patton. France had been occupied since June 1940, but the allies had considered it a low priority for liberation; the thrust was towards Berlin. However, the issue was forced by the outbreak of a general strike and the uprising of the Resistance, and compounded … Read more