Earlier this month, American audiences (a small few, anyway) had the chance to see Gaspar Noé’s harrowing split-screen drama Vortex, in which an elderly Parisian couple falls to pieces. Ten years ago, Michael Haneke’s movie about much the same thing, Amour, was nominated for a best picture Oscar. There was another French dementia drama at Cannes just last year. This is a brutal, though often rewarding, trend, these movies that confront the scariest end-of-life possibilities with an unflinching gaze.

The masterful director Mia Hansen-Løve has returned to Cannes after last year’s lovely Bergman Island to offer her take on all this French fading away. Her film, One Fine Morning, is typical of much of her previous work, in that it is sensitive and wise and seems to amble along a bit aimlessly until suddenly a unified meaning reveals itself. It’s a bitterly sad film, but also warm and gentle enough that one leaves not with a heaving sob but a sigh.

Léa Seydoux plays Sandra, a translator and single mom living in Paris whose father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), has gone blind from a degenerative disease and needs an increasing amount of care. Sandra and her father have not quite accepted that reality, until Sandra’s mother (Nicole Garcia) convinces her that, according to all medical advice, they will need to put Georg in some sort of nursing home.

The process of that, all its personal ache and bureaucratic frustration, takes up roughly half of the film. There is a parallel narrative track in which Sandra falls into an affair with the married Clément (Melvil Poupaud), who was a friend of Sandra’s husband. (I think we are meant to assume that Sandra is a widow.) So here is the beginning of something risky and complicated but bursting with energy, just as, elsewhere in Sandra’s life, her passionate, intellectual father (he taught philosophy at a university) is losing his grip on his joie de vivre.

One Fine Morning follows these threads as Sandra maneuvers twin heartbreaks, one imminent and the other all too possible. Hansen-Løve hasn’t made a psychological wallow of a film, though. One Fine Morning is full of winsome humor about French politics, about the odd idiosyncrasies of children, about the so-horrifying-its-grimly-funny chaos of elder care facilities. The film, and Sandra, need this occasional lightness in order to press on, just as Sandra needs something new—all of Cléments ardent, if unreliable, attention—to draw her out of the fatalism of tending to a parent’s slow death. (And, really, the fatalism of considering one’s own.)

This is a film about caring for people, and for oneself, as a way not just to buttress us against mortality as best as we can, but to feel crucially connected to the fullness of our present tense. We watch as Sandra looks after her father and her daughter, explaining the world to both of them, one at the beginning of their time in it, the other at the end. That Sandra is a translator is certainly not a random detail—her work is to elucidate things for others, to guide people toward understanding as she filters it through her own matrix of knowledge and experience.

As it reaches its softly profound final scene, One Fine Morning pauses to savor the sensory and emotional richness of being alive, its sadness perhaps a necessary counterbalance to its pleasure. Seydoux revels in the opportunity to play such nuanced, everyday feeling. Her performance is finely observed and alert, negotiating subtle shifts in Sandra’s psychology. I’d have to imagine Seydoux would be in the running for the best actress prize here at Cannes, were her film in the main competition rather than the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar.