Ordinary life, familiar issues — a fine movie

  A number of years ago, a friend suggested that there are two kinds of movies: Those that are indisputably entertainments; i.e., they try to tell highly dramatized stories that operate at recognized distances from ordinary reality. 

  Nothing wrong with that but, as my friend argued, another kind of movie also deserves consideration, one that works on a smaller scale while trying to remind us,  “This is how we live.”

  The fine French film One Fine Morning belongs in this latter category, the cinema of ordinary life.

  Relying on a convincing performance from Lea Seydoux, French director Mia Hansen-Love introduces us to a widow and single mother who works as a translator. Seydoux's Sandra has a daughter (Camille Leban Martins) who needs attention. Nothing special. Just the attention eight-year-olds demand.

   The problems that Sandra encounters are vexing and familiar. Her father (Pascal Gregory) is losing himself to dementia, a particularly difficult affliction for a former philosophy professor whose life has revolved around reading and thinking.

   Long separated from her ex-husband, Sandra's mother (Nicole Garcia) tries to help, but she has moved on with her life as a political activist and refuses to make an emotional investment in her former husband’s situation.

    When it becomes clear that Sandra's father no longer can live independently, she attempts to place him in a good nursing home, a problem compounded by cost, waiting lists and practical considerations: What to do with all those books her father has accumulated, his prize possessions?

    Sandra’s life further complicates when she runs into Clement (Melvin Poupaud), an old friend who works as a cosmochemist, a job that has something to do with studying chemical compositions related to the origins of matter. A different kind of chemistry sparks.  A relationship develops. 

   Again, complications can't be avoided. Clement is married and has a young son. He also travels a great deal for his work. Hansen-Love doesn't portray Clement as a louse. He's genuinely conflicted about the affair he's having. Can he do the right thing? And what, in his case, is the right thing?

     For her part, Sandra needs many things: A mature sexual relationship, a solution to her father's problems, and the energy to continue her career while caring for her daughter. 

    Put another way, she's like millions of women who juggle their way through the intricate routines of daily life.

     Hansen-Love avoids the kind of plot points that thunder through a movie. Problems arise. Solutions are found. Compromises are made. Sandra's relationship with Clement assumes an on-again/off-again quality. 

     Credit Seydoux and Hansen-Love with an achievement that doesn’t call undue attention itself: They open a window into a life depicted with clarity but without either brutalizing sharpness or soggy empathy.    

     So, the we leave the movie by paying it the best compliment we can: Yes, this is how life was for some women in 2023. 

Juliette Binoche as a youth-obsessed woman

The French movie, Who You Think I Am, conflates a variety of issues, principal among them perilous games that can be played on social media and the way time impacts women who long for the days when they still could turn heads. It should come as no surprise that Juliette Binoche plays Claire Millaud,  a professor of literature who tries to determine why a younger lover abandoned her. In the process, Claire uses social media to create a fictional avatar, a sexy 24-year-old woman who captivates her former lover’s roommate (Francois Civil).  As the game — if that’s what it is — progresses, Binoche’s character and her new young admirer form a virtual bond that both begin to take seriously. For Claire, the ruse provides a way of recapturing the feelings of her youth, how she felt about herself before her husband left her for a younger woman. Claire, who tells her story to a psychiatrist (Nicole Garcia), has two sons but her obsession with turning back the clock takes precedence over everything else. Of course, reality and fiction eventually must collide and director Safy Nebbou finds ways to make the collision interesting. Who You Think I Am can be a little too self-consciously tricky, but the movie stands as an intriguing and disturbing character study. Binoche makes Claire real and never less than intriguing as a woman who might be delusional, devious, bitter, or sensual -- perhaps all of the above.

Marion Cotillard in 'Land of the Moon'

Marion Cotillard plays a woman longing for love and sex in From the Land of the Moon, a movie based on a 2006 novella by Milena Agus. Set mostly in Provence during the 1950s, the movie introduces three men into the life of Cotillard's Gabrielle. A high school teacher who loans Gabrielle a copy of Wuthering Heights becomes the first man on whom she has a crush. When that proves disastrous, Gabrielle's mother decides that her daughter ought to be married. Mom suggests that Gabrielle marry Jose (Alex Brendemuhl), a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who works on the family farm. Jose agrees even though Gabrielle has vowed never to love him -- and, at least in the beginning, never to have sex with him. The third unlucky chap is Andre Sauvage (Louis Garrel), a veteran of the Indochina war whom Gabrielle meets at a Swiss spa where she has been sent to recover from kidney stones, which the movie refers to -- presumably with metaphoric/psychological intent -- as "stones disease." Throughout, director Nicole Garcia offers suggestions that Gabrielle may be mad. Lush photography aside, everyone in From the Land of the Moon seems to be burdened by unfulfilled desires. Cotillard proves more than capable of playing a woman distracted and possessed by her own inner life. Cotillard dominates every image in which she appears (which is most of them), giving her character an air of troubled beauty; her performance is almost (but not quite) enough to carry From the Land of the Moon to success. A surprise late-picture twist fails to ring true and isn't all that surprising, anyway.