How many mini masterpieces can Mia Hansen-Løve make? Following on from last year’s Bergman Island, she has made ONE FINE MORNING, one fine movie, indeed.

Fine writing, fine casting, fine film making all round, ONE FINE MORNING finds Mia’s movie making skills in maturation saturation.

The luminous Léa Seydoux portrays Sandra, a single mother to daughter, Linn. The story starts with Sandra trying to gain entry to her father’s apartment. He is suffering dementia and is unsure on how to unlock and open the door. At once the focus is on his frustration and her patience.

Sandra is juggling care for her father and her daughter albeit with some support from her sister and mother, Georg’s ex wife, as well as Georg’s partner, Leila.

It’s a complex and rich web and into its sphere comes Clement, a friend of Sandra’s late spouse, a married man and father. A passionate affair ensues.

Sandra is suspended in a spiderweb of selflessness and selfishness, of desire and duty, the agony of guilt, the ecstasy of physical love, and that awful purgatory of mourning someone who is still alive.

The growing number of audiences dealing with dementia will empathise Sandra’s dilemma. Georg will never have a place of his own. In hospitals or old people’s homes, it’s a continuous ballet of people coming in and out of your room. In this film, Georg has to change places four times.

Georg is played by veteran actor Pascal Greggory with a stately bewilderment, elegant in its sensitivity, heartbreaking in its verisimilitude.

Though the subject matter seems dire and bleak, writer director Mia Hansen-Løve infuses it with hope, embracing life and love, balancing notions of self sacrifice and self destruction.

ONE FINE MORNING is a high wire act of rich emotion, intellect and inner strength.