Sandra’s father Georg Kiesler breaks up. His brain is falling apart, he is confused, almost blind, his steps are small and anxious, his back is deeply arched. When he wants to open the door for his daughter, he can’t find the key, he panics, forgets what a door is, what a key is a door. What was the most important thing in life for the philosophy professor fails: thinking.
The disease is a “sneaky creeping snake”
“Degenerative, degeneration, deterioration, earthquake, tsunami, sneaky snake” – this is how the father described his process of decay as a result of a neurodegenerative disease in his scrawled notes. The lyrics, titled “Rare Disease Trip” (written by director Mia Hansen-Løve’s father), are read by Georg (Pascal Greggory) in voiceover towards the end of “On a Beautiful Morning”. Hearing his voice so firm and clear at this moment is comforting.
The physical shell is becoming increasingly distant from the person he once was, but his essence persists: in his thoughts put on paper, the memories of his children and a found sentence that might have become the title of his autobiography. And who also lends the film its title. He also remains alive in the books in his library, which pass into the hands of his students. Sandra (Léa Seydoux) once says that she feels closer to her father with his books than with the dwindling figure in the nursing home. The eye falls on the spines of books on a shelf: Hegel, Baudelaire, Musil, Kafka, Hölderlin, Bernhard, Adorno, Mann. This is how the portrait of a man and his intellectual life is formed.
“On a Beautiful New Morning” is a continuation of the themes that have accompanied Mia Hansen-Løve’s films since her debut “Tout est pardonné” (2007): loss, farewell and living on, the passage of time. Sandra, a translator, widow and mother of a young daughter, thinks her love life is over when she meets Clément, an old friend. As she rediscovers desire, her father’s existence draws to a close. The two narrative threads are fluently interwoven, “An eine schön neu Morgen” is a film full of movement: conversations on the way, arriving and leaving, separations, farewells. A single coming and going.
Love gives Sandra’s life a new perspective, but the circumstances of the beginning relationship are complicated. Clément (Melvil Poupaud) is married and a father, she is left with the role of the lover. Women waiting for men, who have to beg for their attention, cry for them, are a constant in Hansen-Løve’s films. Her cinema is alien to demands that are increasingly being made of female characters today – for example, for agency. They should not be ashamed of their needs, including their neediness. Seydoux, deglamorized with a backpack and everyday sweaters and yet full of radiance, plays Sandra in a very unweeping manner, even if tears keep coming to her eyes.
The simplicity of a shepherd’s song
“On a beautiful new morning” does not gloat over the sometimes sad moments. Despite all the closeness and sensitivity, distance is maintained, and the efficient conciseness, the breaking off of scenes at the right moment, give the film something fundamentally forward-looking. Wistful and comforting at the same time is also a recurring piece of music by the Swedish composer and jazz musician Jan Johansson. It has the simplicity of a shepherd’s song and takes up the no-frills style of the narrative. Hansen-Løve took it from Ingmar Bergman’s film “The Touch”.
The circumstances in which the sick father finds himself despite his professor’s pension can be quite unsettling. When he is looking for a place in a nursing home, he is transported from one dreary makeshift solution to the next, he can only be glad that he cannot see. As close as these scenes are to the current reality of healthcare, the questions of care and welfare: it never becomes a themed film. Just as little as the story with Clément becomes a love triangle film. Nothing solidifies, everything stays in flux.
The autobiographical, which Hansen-Løve recently frayed into a meta-reflexive (and also a little privileged) narrative attitude with “Bergman Island”, finds expression in “On a Beautiful Morning” in a very natural and concrete way. The filmmaker’s grandmother has a beautiful appearance, she speaks very realistically about the difficulties of a long life, the effort of climbing stairs and how to meet pitying looks with dignity. “It’s sometimes a little difficult… to live”. She says it with ease.
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Source: Tagesspiegel
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