Marvelous Mornings

Set in a sleepy Mediterranean seaside town, Avril Besson’s feature debut Marvelous Mornings (Les matins merveilleux) follows Charlie (India Hair), who drives down from Paris after her grandmother’s death to deliver a box of old records to an address she does not recognise. What begins as a simple errand gradually draws Charlie into both the memories of her late mother and an unexpected romance, through encounters with Titou (Eric Cantona), a former admirer who still treasures vinyl disco records of her mother dancing disco routines decades earlier, and Marina (Raya Martigny), a pizzeria employee who disrupts Charlie’s comfortable obliviousness.

Marvelous Mornings leans heavily into a kind of offbeat whimsy, but its eccentricities often feel overly mannered rather than organic. Charlie is written with an almost aggressively Amélie-style awkwardness: quirky, impulsive and perpetually oblivious to the world around her. Hair does what she can with the script, finding humour in Charlie’s faux pas and childlike mannerisms, but the performance can only stretch so far. For a woman in her thirties, Charlie’s naiveté feels more bizarre than endearing. At one point Marina insists that this obliviousness is “part of her charm”, though the picture never quite convinces one of that itself. Charlie’s behaviour is so detached from emotional reality that it often becomes difficult to understand what genuinely motivates her beyond the screenplay’s desire to preserve her quirky persona. The story improves considerably whenever Marina enters the frame. As a transgender woman working in the village pizzeria while dreaming of becoming a fashion designer and escaping somewhere bigger, she emerges as by far the most compelling character in the piece. Martigny gives Marina a quiet emotional clarity that the rest of the feature lacks, and her chemistry with Hair feels refreshingly unforced. Their relationship develops with a believable gentleness, allowing flirtation and tenderness to unfold at an easy, natural pace rather than through contrived romantic beats.

Yet the film continually undermines itself by gesturing towards deeper themes it seems reluctant to confront. Transphobia hovers at the edges of Marina’s story, occasionally invoked to lend dramatic weight before being left largely unexplored. Besson appears to want the emotional seriousness that comes with addressing prejudice without actually interrogating it in any meaningful way, leaving the picture feeling frustratingly half-formed. Nor does the feature compensate stylistically. Aside from a handful of scenes that briefly come alive – particularly Charlie’s attempts to recreate her mother’s disco routine from the old vinyl records – the cinematography largely falls flat despite the visual possibilities of its seaside setting and musical nostalgia. Ultimately, Marvelous Mornings is a likeable but uncertain debut, unable to reconcile its quirky affectations with its heavier emotional themes.