Director: Mia Hansen-Løve

Stars: Léa Seydoux, Pascal Gregorry, Melvil Poupaud, Nicole Garcia

Writer-director Mia Hansen-Love and Léa Seydoux prove a perfect match in this affecting drama about a woman weighing up her place in the world. Seydoux is Sandra Kienzler, a single mother with an eight-year-old daughter just about managing to get by in Paris on her wages as a freelance interpreter. She’s also the primary carer for her father Pascal (Gregorry), a retired philosophy professor with a neurodegenerative disease. While trying to secure a decent nursing home for Pascal, which is proving a torturous process, Sandra runs into old acquaintance chemist Clément (Poupaud) and they start an affair. Rather than providing some respite, this only serves to complicate Sandra’s life further as Clement, who also has a child, deliberates over splitting for good from his wife. Bourgeois angst playing out in small, book-lined Paris apartments may sound a little overfamiliar and unpromising, but Hansen-Løve maintains an arrestingly meditative and wistful feel throughout, while mining moments of grace in the quotidian, and inserting cheeky digs at aggressively flashy American drama. A de-glammed Seydoux has never been better, while Nicole Garcia brings the tart comedy as Sandra’s no-nonsense mum Francoise, who has developed a taste for taking part in unruly leftist protests.

David Willoughby

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