Hansen-Løve gives us close-up shots of the shelves, of matching sets of Adorno and Thomas Mann, volumes of Kierkegaard and Baudelaire. Later, there is a scene in which many are being reshelved: Sandra has found new custodians for whom these books also represent something significant about her father.

One Fine Morning, as always with Hansen-Løve, never presses too hard on these moments. They are part of a work built on rhythms and repetitions, on the texture of daily life and the passage of time. This is a film about loss, forgetting, and letting go, but it is also an unfolding story of discovery and change. The father’s decline is at the centre, but so too is the growth of a new, unexpected relationship between Sandra and an old friend.

The return of this figure from the past, Clément (Melvil Poupaud), brings desire, demands, challenges. Sandra, whose husband died five years ago, has not embarked on another relationship in the interim. Clément is married, with a young son, and the situation with Sandra becomes increasingly difficult for him to navigate.

Pascal Greggory and Lea Seydoux in One Fine Morning

As an actor, Seydoux is a distinctive presence, but something of a chameleon. Here, with short hair and a scrubbed face, she is a woman constantly on the move, with barely a moment of repose.

In the opening scene, the situation is immediately established. Sandra goes to visit her father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), in his upstairs apartment and has to coach him through the process of finding his key and opening the door to her. He can barely see, and he is confused. It’s not simply that he’s losing his sight: it’s a more complicated process of deterioration that we witness over the course of the film.

Georg’s condition means that he is also losing his facility with language, a painful development for a man obsessed with clarity and rigour; there is still a flash of it, early on, when he takes issue with the notion that he has ‘agreed’ to do something. Before long, he can barely make sense, as he obligingly responds to Sandra’s questions in ways that are somehow poetic yet increasingly cryptic. He is unfailingly polite, yet he is also withdrawing. Sandra comes to realise that Leila (Fejria Deliba), his companion of five years, is the focus of his love. Leila has health issues of her own and is unable to care for him. It is her visits, above all, that matter to him.

Over the course of eight features, Hansen-Løve has consistently explored father–daughter relationships and the way that families operate. In One Fine Morning, family dynamics play out in a range of ways, as Sandra and her family – including her mother, long divorced from her father – join forces to wrestle with the aged care system, take holidays, and celebrate Christmas together.

Their encounters are usually marked by a lightness and sense of familiarity, goodwill and not too much overt friction. There are fault lines, but in the end what we see are reproaches rather than ruptures, generational differences that can be openly expressed.

Hansen-Løve is also drawn to the exploration of vocation and its place in people’s lives. Georg – like the filmmaker’s own parents, and the character played by Isabelle Huppert in her feature, Things To Come (L’avenir, 2016) – was a philosophy lecturer. Sandra is a translator and interpreter, working across French, English, and German, her father’s first language. The film is punctuated with brief scenes of her at work, at business and government events. There is also a long-standing translation project on the letters of Annemarie Schwarzenbach, an intriguing figure from the first half of the twentieth century. Translating Schwarzenbach, a queer writer, photographer, and adventurer who died in her mid-thirties, seems to represent a different as yet unexplored application of Sandra’s skills.

When Sandra meets Clément again, this project is one of the first things he asks her about. Years earlier, she had given him one of Schwarzenbach’s travel books as a present, and he talks about reading it as he journeyed to the Antarctic.

Clément describes himself as a cosmo-chemist, a scientist specialising in the collection and analysis of extraterrestrial dust. It is very much in keeping with Hansen-Løve’s embrace of detail and specificity that we visit him in his workplace. There is something about the nature of his work – down to earth, yet star-gazing – that suits both the character of Clément and the approach of the filmmaker.

Hansen-Løve often uses personal experiences as starting points for her films; in this instance, her father suffered the same debilitating syndrome as Georg. She wrote One Fine Morning during his illness and drew on recordings of conversations with him for parts of Georg’s dialogue. There is also a moving, layered scene, almost a distillation of the entire film, in which past and present are combined. It uses a text Hansen-Løve’s own father wrote. The scene begins with Sandra looking through one of Georg’s old notebooks. Next, we see images of her going about her day, visiting him, meeting up with her daughter, going to work; at the same time, we hear Georg’s voice reading aloud a section from that notebook, a fragmented kind of poem that traces, with distressing clarity, symptoms, medical terms, thoughts, reflections and his growing sense of loss. ‘Irony of things,’ he says. ‘This disease punishes me in what is dearest to me, reading.’

One Fine Morning (Palace Films) is on national release from 8 June 2023.