Hello again,
I saw One Fine Morning by Mia Hansen-Løve recently. This won’t be a review or anything like that. But I want to write a little here about what Hansen-Løve managed to achieve with the protagonist of this film, Sandra.
Sandra is a character I essentially feel revulsion towards and yet, at the same time, I am interested in trying to understand better. And interested in spending time with. By which I do not mean that I feel empathy for her. I do not, and actually I think empathy for a character would be easier to engender than what I feel towards Sandra. Empathy is a state of understanding, almost of feeling, the emotions and actions of another. And I don’t feel that.
I find Sandra irrational, confusing and frustrating. But I am interested in thinking about why she acts and feels the way she does. And how she would see herself, or how someone who feels sympathetic towards her would see her. And I find this to be a more intriguing, lasting relationship with a character than empathy may have been.
Before I say more I should briefly explain what Sandra is like. From what I have said so far it might sound like Sandra is a morally corrupt character with a likable or sensitive side. Maybe a Tony Soprano type; someone who does uncomplicatedly bad things but who we, as the audience, feel a connection with. Partly because of the private, special insight we have into their life and thoughts compared to the other characters. Partly because any small acts of humanity (having a friend, giving someone a lift) seem magnified compared to the rest of their persona. But no, Sandra isn’t like this.
She is actually, ostensibly, much more straightforwardly sympathetic. She is a single mother who’s elderly father, an esteemed academic, has recently been instituted in a retirement home with a degenerative neurological illness. (I know, what a terrible person I am for feeling revolted by an onscreen single mother with a sick father!) Parallel to this she has started having an affair with a married man, potentially a bad thing to do but quotidianly so (and this film is set in Paris, so especially quotidianly so). She has a worshipful and plainly blinkered relationship with her father and is dismissive of her mother and the difficult relationship her and the father shared. But not outrageously so.
Why then was she so revolting to me? Well, there was an element of her character that subtly came into focus over the course of the film. Sandra has a childlike quality, and a lack of self-assurance, which I came to find more and more grotesque. This was emphasized by the costume choices. She was styled, not even as a teenager, but as a primary school child; in floral sandals, striped t-shirts, a school bag worn on both shoulders and shapeless jeans. Often (and cleverly, I thought) she was wearing almost exactly the same outfit as her daughter, who seemed to be around 10 or younger. In the final scene the pair are wearing matching girlish floral dresses and sandals. Each with a red accessory - a hint of adult womanhood?
I find childlike whimsy in adults extremely unsettling. Regular readers will know I tend to find grand emotional displays (I was crying, I was shaking) unsettling too. They often strike me as performative, but childlike whimsy even more so. And there was lots of this from Sandra. Sandra licking a messy ice cream and then running, giggling off down the street with it. Sandra wandering cluelessly around an art gallery, never once looking at anything on the walls. Sandra whispering to her domineering lover Clement that she has forgotten (?) how to have sex. Sandra sulking and throwing moody strops for not being centered over a wife and son she always knew about.
Sandra’s mother is rendered as practical, hardy and funny. Yet perceived as ridiculous by her children, and cold by Sandra especially. Part of Hansen-Løve’s genius is managing to convey both a character, and the often skewed perception their family members have of them, even if they only have a few scenes on screen.
There is a moment when the mother jokily refers to the fact that the father’s social workers always contact her relating to the father’s care, even though they have been divorced for 20 years. It is her who decides to sell his house to fund his care, while Sandra flounces about where his books will be stored. This was a short, interesting comment on the extent of the devotion Sandra feels for her father; it doesn’t extend to organising practical matters, or even being the listed contact for social services.
The affair too, I found maddening. When Sandra got together with the married man, Clement, I understood it as her needing to blow off steam. I didn’t read him as her perfect match. He seemed, more than anything else, simply a man she had (in a fairly closed life) happened to meet. He was also plainly a substitute father figure: a married academic with a domineering manner. When he broke things off I thought: Great! Now that she’s back in the world of romance and dating she’ll take it upon herself to go out and find someone else. Hopefully a better fit!
But of course, no. She did not. She sat waiting for him to text. Likewise, when she discovered an affair of her father’s was still ongoing, and her feelings of rejection and jealousy about that affair resurfaced, I assumed it would make her behave with more compassion towards Clement’s wife and son. Of course not, she carried on as before.
So why am I writing so much about this character I essentially loathe? Well I think she is a great example of subtle, complicated characterisation. A great fictional character basically. Sandra really got under my skin. She is infuriating (and her motivations impenetrable to me) in the way that real people often are. But something about her did feel recognisable too. And I could tell while watching that my response to her was specific to me. That all her little quirks and the whimsical dashing around with an ice cream would read as winning to someone else.
There have been calls for more complicated fictional characters in the last few years. But I feel this too often means “characters who do bad things but we are made to like anyway”, which is not really a complicated character as much as another stock type. I think a complicated character should make you feel things you find hard to explain, which are specific to you and your own character and the sorts of people you tend to feel an affinity with. Probably they do some bad or morally reprehensible things, but not because that’s an interesting tool of characterisation in and of itself, and instead because that’s just what real people are like.
After I left One Fine Morning I was thinking (conversely to my dislike of Sandra) about the huge affinity I feel for the eccentric single mothers in Yūko Tsushima’s fiction. In some ways they aren’t so different from Sandra. They are selfish. They have affairs with difficult men. They make rash, stupid decisions. They can be mercurial, cruel and snappy to their children. They are sometimes actually pretty unpleasant. Actually they’re probably a lot more difficult than Sandra is. They are, above all else, so, so weird. And everything they do feels as inevitable to me as Sandra feels impenetrable. And as real.
Till next time xxxx
Thank you so much if you came to my reading last week! And especially if you laughed when things were supposed to be funny :).
If you didn’t come, come next time! And pre-order it here: for the UK (it will be out in August) and the US (it will be out in October). Pre-orders tell shops that people are interested in and excited about the book which helps the book a lot.
Some Things I Liked Recently:
One Fine Morning. In case it isn’t clear from the above. Wow I loved that film.
I re read this on Kurt Cobain and his relationship to fame recently for something I am writing about fame and loved it again. I have read it quite a few times now but find something new each time:
In October, 1993, I visited Kurt in Seattle while the band was rehearsing for the “In Utero” tour, and one night he invited me to a practice. He claimed it would be boring, but then he said everything about his life was boring. It wasn’t, of course.
A lot of this essay by Garth Greenwell. (Except some of the stuff on Philip Roth, who I think is a little over-rated as a stylist by many Americans because his subject matter resonates so much with them, maybe more on that another time. Though I do agree with the comments on morality as it pertains to his fiction in this essay). Here is a bit I liked:
The problem is that, in much of our discussion of art, I think we’ve made a mistake about what moral engagement is, and so what art’s role in it might be. In much of our commentary, there’s a desire for art to be exemplary, to present a world the moral valence of which, whether positive or negative, is easily legible; there’s a desire for the work of art to provide an index of judgment clearly predicated on values the reader can approve.
I really liked the assertion in garth's essay that art is moral and does have a role in moral education. A lot of the opposition to cancel culture comes from aesthetes, and I simply don't identify with their position--I don't read proust, personally, because of the great sentences, but because of the moral complexity of his characters. In fact the position of the aesthetes is a bit incoherent because why couldn't you write great sentences about virtuous people? (Their response is that great sentences require nuance and tend to embody moral complexity, but that's a complicated retreat into formalism that's hard to prove or even demonstrate, especially because most readers have a tin ear and don't quite understand what makes a sentence great)
I am a little surprised though by the kind of despair I so often see in literary writers and at their capitulation before their students. The paragraph where he describes how writers despair that they can produce work that speaks to this moment just seems strange. If you believe in your own values, and they are in conflict with the world, then isn't that exciting? Isn't that precisely the moment when your work is MOST meaningful? To me the fact that anesthetic greatness and moral complexity are inextricable, and incompatible with prescriptions and shibboleths, is a truth that flows directly from my experience of literature. It's something many people seem not to understand, but I never doubt that I am correct and they are not. So why the despair? I think many of the writers he is writing about are despairing because they don't really have a strong sense of values--they just believe what they were told to, and they wrote the fiction they were supposed to, and they got rewarded for it. Now they don't know how to do the tricks that later generations want, and so they're sad and scared. The work never came from a true anesthetic sense, instead it was born of a feedback loop between themselves and the tastes of their peers. They wrote not what they needed to write, but what their peers and teachers liked. Which of course we all do--but I at least always maintain a sense of what in my work is necessary for me and what is just necessary for the market.
I guess what I am saying in a long rambling way is they compare this to the soviet union, and yet they clearly lack the integrity of a solzhenitsyn or a mandelstam. Instead they resemble the poor cadres, purged in 1937, who sit in the gulags whining about what great communists they are and about how comrade Stalin must be simply listening to bad advisers.