New York Film Festival 2022: WILL-O’-THE-WISP & ONE FINE MORNING

My latest dispatch from the 2022 New York Film Festival features two great films involving passionate love affairs — but, apart from that, they could not be more radically different. Read on for more!

Will-o’-the-Wisp (João Pedro Rodrigues)

A vibrant “musical fantasia” directed by João Pedro Rodrigues, Will-o’-the-Wisp begins in the year 2069 with King Alfredo of Portugal alone on his deathbed. Like Proust’s madeleine dipped in tea, a snippet of song sung by a child sends a deluge of memories from Alfredo’s youth flooding back to greet him. Flashback to 2011, when the young Crown Prince Alfredo (Mauro Costa) decides to channel his concern about the state of the environment into becoming a volunteer firefighter. Needless to say, the rest of his family are more preoccupied with accumulating and protecting their own wealth than doing anything to help their people.

On his first day with the fire brigade, Alfredo meets an instructor named Afonso (André Cabral). Alfredo is royal and white; Afonso is republican and Black. They have little in common apart from a desire to fight fires — and get it on. Their passionate lovemaking includes muttering racially charged insults at each other, which seemingly enhances their enjoyment of the act. But Alfredo’s royal destiny threatens to destroy the strange, sensual happiness they have found together.

Will-o’-the-Wisp mixes potent eroticism and satirical humor with substantial angst over the state of the world, commenting on everything from economic inequality to governmental ineptitude to colonial destruction. Rodrigues also embraces anachronism, having Alfredo utter lines from Greta Thunberg’s famous 2019 speech about climate change at the United Nations — You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones” — despite the film’s scene taking place in 2011. Nonetheless, it’s a potent scene and a haunting reminder that in the years since Thunberg first spoke those words, little has changed in regard to the state of the world (unless you count things getting worse).

A maximalist storyteller if there ever was one, Rodrigues also litters his film with several entertaining musical numbers, including some delicious song-and-dance numbers with fit firefighters. When Alfredo and Afonso first act on their attraction to each other, it is through dance, touching, lifting, and flipping each other’s bodies through space. It’s a beautiful sequence, especially when the rest of the fire brigade joins in. The film’s final scene, which takes place at Alfredo’s funeral, includes his fellow firefighters contorting his body into artistic poses and a couple of black-clad gossips snarking about the state of the royal family. It’s altogether hilarious and yet still heartfelt, extremely weird but wonderful regardless—just like the rest of Will-o’-the-Wisp. Check it out if you have the chance.

One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve)

Mia Hansen-Løve’s characters regularly struggle with love, commitment, and other ordinary obligations, but perhaps none more so than the protagonist of her lovely new drama, One Fine Morning. Sandra (the luminous Lea Seydoux) is a freelance translator and single mother; when she’s not working, she’s either caring for her young daughter or her aged father (Pascal Greggory), a philosophy professor who is slowly succumbing to a neurodegenerative disease that is destroying his sight and his mind. When it becomes clear that her father needs round-the-clock care, Sandra and her other family members embark on a quest through the French nursing home system to find an acceptable place for him to live while also clearing out his flat — including his beloved library.

It’s emotionally exhausting, juggling being a mother with being a daughter, let alone being a working woman on top of it all. Soon, Sandra finds much-needed solace in a passionate love affair with her friend Clément (Melvil Poupaud), a cosmochemist who claims his marriage is falling apart. In Clément, Sandra finds refuge from the obligations of everyday life; when they’re together, everything else melts away. But their relationship cannot last forever in this form; either Clément must leave his wife, or Sandra — not content to be merely a mistress until the end of time — must give up the one thing that makes her most difficult days bearable.

What makes One Fine Morning—and all of Hansen-Løve’s other movies—so enjoyable is that her characters’ problems are rendered authentically, without any heightened drama or unrealistic plot twists. Everything that happens to Sandra is messy, complicated, and not easily resolved—just like in real life. As she and her sister, Elodie (Sarah Le Picard), and her mother, Françoise (Nicole Garcia, who provides most of the film’s comic relief — her escapades as a wannabe climate activist are downright hilarious), repeatedly move her father from one rundown nursing home to another, desperately hoping a room in a decent place will open up soon, their pain is palpable and recognizable; if you have not been in their unenviable position, you no doubt know someone who has.

When Sandra leaves a visit with her father, only for him to wander down the hall of the nursing home calling for his companion Leila (Fejria Deliba), she ignores him, stays in the elevator, and lets the door close. It’s a move that may seem cold, but when one considers how much emotional energy Sandra used up during the visit, can one really blame her for not wanting to stay any longer? Embarking on an affair with a married man is never a good idea, but when that man is as sympathetic (and sexy) as Clément, it’s hard to judge Sandra for falling into his arms. Hansen-Løve certainly doesn’t. She just shows us an imperfect woman who doesn’t always make the right life choices and allows us to understand why.

At the center of it all is Seydoux, with her hair cut short enough to make her a dead ringer for Jean Seberg and with that same rare mix of steel and vulnerability. She’s best in the quiet scenes where she attempts to control her feelings, barely holding back tears on a public bus or in the common room of her father’s nursing home. Sandra is always taking care of someone else; she is rarely given the chance to do something for herself or to succumb to her own swirling emotions. When she does break down and cry, those tears are a moment of catharsis for both her and the audience; you’ll be hard pressed to not cry with her, or at least have the urge to reassure her that in the end, it will all be some kind of fine (albeit never quite as fine you wish it could be).

What do you think? Have you been able to catch any of the films at this year’s New York Film Festival? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Will-o’-the-Wisp is screening as part of the Currents section and One Fine Morning is screening as part of the Main Slate at the 2022 New York Film Festival.