Film reviews: THE QUIET GIRL and ONE FINE MORNING 

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• Neon Films
• Catherine Clinch in The Quiet Girl

We didn't really need Leo Tolstoy to formalize the notion that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own unique way; a whole bunch of folks live that reality daily. But it's perhaps more relevant to the matter of storytelling that unhappy families are just more interesting, dramatically speaking, than happy families. Wrestling with the messiness of our closest relationships lends itself to infinite creative possibilities—to the extent that two features opening this week alone both dig into that complicated territory.

The Oscar-nominated Irish drama The Quiet Girl, adapting Claire Keegan's story "Foster," is set in an unspecified mid-20th-century year, where pre-teen Cáit (Catherine Clinch) is living an all-but-invisible existence as a middle child in a family of soon-to-be six children. With Cáit's mother about to give birth to her latest baby, Cáit is sent off for the summer to live with Cáit's cousin Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) and her husband Seán (Andrew Bennett) on their family farm, forced to connect with people she barely knows.

Writer/director Colm Bairéad effectively establishes Cáit's status right from the outset—hidden in tall grass like an animal trying to camouflage itself—as well as the emotional hardships she faces, from bed-wetting to going to school without a lunch. There's an oddly nostalgic hue to the way Bairéad shoots scenes that a child clearly shouldn't remember fondly, but there's also a keen sense of a kid becoming aware of the things they're too old to fully comprehend, like the contempt between her parents and the reality that her dad (Michael Patric) has a mistress.

Clinch's internalized performance has to carry a lot of The Quiet Girl's dramatic weight, and Bairéad might be counting a bit too much on silences keeping us engaged (especially when one of the most entertaining scenes involves a town gossip pumping Cáit for information about Eibhlín and Seán's lives). Nevertheless, there's a strong emotional punch to the relationships Cáit forms with both Eibhlín and Seán, offering a reminder that the most powerful force in a child's life is having someone willing and able to fully, completely notice them.

• Sony Pictures Classics
• Léa Seydoux and Camille Leban Martins in One Fine Morning

ONE FINE MORNING
Léa Seydoux
Pascal Greggory
Melvil Poupaud
Rated R
Available March 3 at Broadway Centre Cinemas

Sandra Kienzler (Léa Seydoux)—the protagonist of Mia Hansen-Løve's One Fine Morning—is an adult living a life in contemporary Paris, so she faces an entirely different set of challenges from The Quiet Girl's Cáit. In fact, where Cáit suffers from too little attention, Sandra may suffer from too much: On top of her job as a translator, Sandra has to take care of her daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins) alone as a widowed single mother, and faces the difficult business of finding care for her father (Pascal Greggory) as a neurological condition diminishes his ability to live independently. And all of that is before she gets involved in a romance with Clément (Melvil Poupaud), a married friend.

Hansen-Løve's screenplay isn't exactly filled with earth-shaking incident, so the focus is really on the small details of the character interactions. There's a wonderfully perceptive scene involving Sandra and Linn quarrelling over their respective reaction to a kid-friendly film they've just seen, and plenty of sensitively-handled material as Sandra deals with the emotional fallout from watching her father deteriorate, and having to deal with disposing of all of his possessions.

What the filmmaker and Seydoux capture most effectively, however, is how easy it is for someone whose entire existence is built around making sure other people have what they need—her professional life as someone necessary for others' comprehension fits into this idea perfectly—to get completely lost in not recognizing what they need. One Fine Morning turns into an ideal dramatic interpretation of the well-known airline instruction about needing to put on your own oxygen mask before you can help someone else with their own, as we watch Sandra wrestle with figuring out how to even find an oxygen mask. It's a rare kind of film that recognizes the times when selfishness is a virtue, and when you need to remove yourself from a situation in order to approach it, ultimately, in the healthiest possible way.

That's the trickiest part of dealing with family, both of these movies remind us: understanding the difference between what those we are connected to by blood are capable of giving us, and what we know we deserve.