It’s enough that Léa Seydoux is in every frame to give reason to watch this delicate French Rohmer-esque drama from Mia Hansen-Løve.

It doesn’t feel like it’s about much, you are a fly on the wall following a women, Sandra (Leydoux) juggling single parenting and caring for her father Georg (Pascal Greggory) who has a neurodegenerative disease akin to Alzheimer’s. She seems content enough with her daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins) and job as an interpreter.

Two things happen to create conflict in her life – she bumps into an old friend, Clément (Melvil Poupaud) and they begin an affair, and her father’s cognitive decline means he will have to be put into care. Another director or culture might make these two factors into definitive and high drama, creating a narrative arc that resolves, but Hansen-Løve makes us sit with the messy, laboured nature of love and letting go.

There are some quiet and non-eventful moments surrounding Georg and his former career as a professor of philosophy that don’t at first seem central to the narrative. Sandra and her sister must pack up and find homes for his huge library of books. They keep some, give some to former students of his and Sandra talks about the library representing his soul whereas his body now no longer feels like him.

It’s only after the credits roll, when the film ends on nothing in particular other than ‘a beautiful morning’ that you see the undercurrent of philosophy. Our lives are not who we love, the job we had or the way we end up, it’s the way we live each day. Nice.

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