Sometimes when everyone praises a movie that you can’t stand, you wonder what has been what you have not been able to see, scrutinize between its frames, understand between its scenes. What seemed heavy and repetitive to you seemed like an emotional shipwreck to most people. When you thought the scenes were botched, others saw magic between the frames.
This is the case of ‘A Beautiful Morning’, presented at the last Cannes Film Festival, a film that I couldn’t help but feel somewhat empty and indecisive but that not a few have hailed as an essential achievement of modern European cinema.
a regular morning
On paper, Mia Hansen-Love’s film is more than interesting: a woman with a sick father who, at the same time, deals with the adversities of life with the presence of a new impossible love, lost between an unfortunate fate and a heartbreak that grows But, when it comes down to it, ‘A pretty morning’ seems made up of two different films that did not stand on their own and united with a plot thread of the finest.
What’s more: one of the two stories (that of the father) is much more interesting than the other, which it falls into continuous clichés and fails to hold the viewer’s attention. Sadly, wanting to portray a character between hope and heartbreak, the film doesn’t quite intertwine well and only at the end can we see the link between the two sides of Sandra’s life. Hansen Love does not succeed in its purpose of making us understand a character who clearly adores but who feels deeply apathetic.
That does not mean that the film is not honest in its aspirations, far from it: ‘A beautiful morning’ is natural and organic, beautiful in its own way, with complex characters corroded by their own personal desires that, once raised, never stop exploding and end up continually revolving around the same problems. There is no evolution and, therefore, the portrait remains in a sketch that can never be finished except by force.
oh dad
Despite the always magnetic presence of Léa Seydoux, the film finds its greatest plot appeal in the character of the fatheraware of his own neural degeneration: the true drama of the film is not so much in Sandra’s reaction to seeing her father’s missteps, but in that man who was once an eminence and is now reduced to a minimum. He is the one who gives away the best moments of ‘A beautiful morning’ and he is missed every time the film decides to focus on a rather bland affair that has little to contribute.
‘A nice morning’ manages, in the monotony, to find moments of authentic truth, small magical islets within the silence in which Léa Seydoux shows her fragility through looks that express the inner despair of a character destroyed by a day-to-day life that does not allow her to have a single moment of happiness without slapping her face afterwards. Not enough to make the film remarkable, but enough to give it a dignity that would otherwise be compromised.
Hansen-Love’s film does not hit the nail on the head in its attempt to reflect on parental care for children, the disagreement of love in the 21st century and happiness in troubled times, but It is not less appreciable for that. Who knows: hopefully you can see in her everything that I was not able to.
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