I got so bored watching this that I made up a little song as I did: 'I know you got nothing to say / But you waste my time with it anyway.'
Really, I don't mean to single this movie out, it's more what I feel about 90% of the arthouse fare I encounter these days, especially on Mubi.
This one's very pretty, not just in terms of its actors but their clothes and homes - like a lot of French films, which increasingly look as if they're parodying themselves with these impeccable, magazine-spread stylings.
It even has the raggedly worn out cliché of a philosophy professor as a prominent character. We see lots of his books, but naturally no actual philosophical discussions are had, unless you count the film's general, implicitly panicky message that life is short and we should grab love while we can. Not good or serious philosophy at all in my view, in practice leading not to this film's too easy happy ending but to a lot of frustration with love turning out not to be the great cure-all of such sentimental myth.
At least the best romances let us believe and bask in the myth for a short while by inducing us to fall in love with the protagonists, but what are we to do with the blandly dimensionless, insipidly nice people we see here? The only hope would have been to recognise that they are not nice, the niceness is a veneer, and that another consequence of making love a value above all can be people getting hurt: note that the grabbing love while you can here requires the breakup of a marriage with kid and that, it seems, for us to accept that, we must never encounter or think about the wronged wife.
I'm sorry, but it makes me want to do a little rewrite: after the death of the demented philosopher father - the man whose condition seems to lie behind all this adrenal lunging at love - the daughter finds in his papers not the anodyne phrase of the title, 'One fine morning,' but the steelier, and, given the father's condition, more ironic: 'One fine morning, I will forget myself.' Thus chastened, the protagonist meets the wife, gets her side of the story, and gives up the affair.
If only. My song went on: 'It's not enough to look at your pretty face / Telling me stories that don't go any place.'
Really, I don't mean to single this movie out, it's more what I feel about 90% of the arthouse fare I encounter these days, especially on Mubi.
This one's very pretty, not just in terms of its actors but their clothes and homes - like a lot of French films, which increasingly look as if they're parodying themselves with these impeccable, magazine-spread stylings.
It even has the raggedly worn out cliché of a philosophy professor as a prominent character. We see lots of his books, but naturally no actual philosophical discussions are had, unless you count the film's general, implicitly panicky message that life is short and we should grab love while we can. Not good or serious philosophy at all in my view, in practice leading not to this film's too easy happy ending but to a lot of frustration with love turning out not to be the great cure-all of such sentimental myth.
At least the best romances let us believe and bask in the myth for a short while by inducing us to fall in love with the protagonists, but what are we to do with the blandly dimensionless, insipidly nice people we see here? The only hope would have been to recognise that they are not nice, the niceness is a veneer, and that another consequence of making love a value above all can be people getting hurt: note that the grabbing love while you can here requires the breakup of a marriage with kid and that, it seems, for us to accept that, we must never encounter or think about the wronged wife.
I'm sorry, but it makes me want to do a little rewrite: after the death of the demented philosopher father - the man whose condition seems to lie behind all this adrenal lunging at love - the daughter finds in his papers not the anodyne phrase of the title, 'One fine morning,' but the steelier, and, given the father's condition, more ironic: 'One fine morning, I will forget myself.' Thus chastened, the protagonist meets the wife, gets her side of the story, and gives up the affair.
If only. My song went on: 'It's not enough to look at your pretty face / Telling me stories that don't go any place.'