French
filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve has said that all her films are completely autobiographical – and completely fictional, at the same time.
It was quite clear in her previous work "Bergman island", where a couple of filmmakers (admittedly with different names than Hansen-Løve and her ex-husband, the director Olivier Assayas, but it "is" them after all) strain their relationship during the Bergman week on Fårö
Even more so in a story that came to Hansen-Løve when her father entered the fog of dementia.
Léa Seydoux plays the director's representative on the screen, a mother of young children who, while taking care of her increasingly ill father, meets an old friend, with whom she begins a love affair.
Passion and sex in one corner, sadness and care for the old in the other.
Two strong emotions, of very different kinds.
Is it possible to combine?
The question is
simple and so is the answer.
Mia Hansen-Løve has never been one to hide her sentences in hard-to-reach labyrinths, what we see is what we get.
And usually that goes a long way.
She is a confident storyteller who digs where she stands, and brings out sympathetic relationship dramas, with universal values and high EQ.
But it is still Léa Seydoux who is the biggest attraction.
As always.
It is her obvious screen presence that makes things happen in the subtitle.
Few are so schooled (or naturally gifted) in the difficult art of expressing multiple moods at once.
Such
slice-of-life stories, i.e. films that only give us a slice of a person's everyday life, have their obvious charm and accessibility, but they can also become a bit mundane.
Stating rather than engaging.
Just like that, "A beautiful day..." saunters along, like a quiet-sounding piano piece - stylish, pleasant, laid-back.
Without arousing the big emotions.
The drama's minor-key music setting is thus congenial, consisting only of a repetition of Jan Johansson's clear, beautiful tune "Like a shepherdess" that Bergman fan Hansen-Løve has taken from IB's "Beröringen".