Even in supposedly enlightened societies it is practically an article of faith that a woman’s identity as a mother must supercede all her other identities. Not only that: any woman not willing to sacrifice all the other love in her life for the love of her child is unnatural, an aberration and the ultimate taboo: a bad mother. Anna Cazenave Cambet’s sweeping, moving “Love Me Tender,” based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Constance Debré, aims at the heart of this pervasive ideology of hypocrisy and unreachably high expectations, and largely thanks to a rivetingly radiant Vicky Krieps, hits its mark with painful accuracy. The paths to what is socially deemed success as a mother are few and narrow and heavily policed, but there are a million ways to fail.
Krieps, lean and rangy in T-shirts and denim, plays Clémence, a divorced writer who used to be a lawyer, and amicably shares custody of her eight-year-old son Paul (Viggo Ferreira-Redier) with her ex-husband Laurent (Antoine Reinartz, so memorable as the prosecuting attorney in “Anatomy of a Fall.”) We’re introduced to a contented and excited Clémence who seems in the wake of major self-revelation. At the pool one day she swims her laps, casually hooks up with a woman in her changing cabin, then emerges to a sunny Parisia day and phones her kid. He asks her how far she swam today. In a little ritual between them, she shows him the sky.
DP Kristy Baboul’s warm, loose camera swirls around her as a classical viola plays — some days are just good days — but Clémence has not yet told Laurent (let alone Paul) that she’s seeing women now. So she arranges a meeting with her ex in a familiar cafe and breaks the news, trusting of his reaction, confident in his understanding. In fact, it’s almost funny, the way it plays out, with Laurent’s fake ok-with-it response followed by an inordinately long pull on his drink. But later, in retrospect, we’ll understand the undercurrents in that clever scene, and wonder if Clémence’s lighthearted demeanor, and her friendly but firm rebuff of the pass Laurent makes at her later, are what causes his unthinkable bitterness to brew. Because Clémence’s newfound sexual freedom obscurely rouses Laurent to inflict the most vindictive ongoing revenge on her. First simply keeping Paul from her, lawyer Laurent then gets the courts involved, filing spurious allegations of the ugliest kind in a successful bid to get her custody suspended entirely. The damage this will do to Paul never seems to be a factor.
Here the film, like Clémence’s life, forks into two: One part of her carries on her professional, personal and romantic life, the other takes on the near-full-time job of fighting through a legal quagmire to have her maternal rights restored. Even though all involved understand she is blameless, the tortuous process drags on to the extent that she will not see Paul for 18 months, or as she says in voiceover (sparingly but eloquently excerpted from the work of autofiction Clémence is writing) “two of her birthdays, one of his.” Even then, she is restricted to brief sessions under supervision by a social worker(Aurélia Petit). “Can I hold him on my lap?” she begs, and the ensuing embrace is a heartbreaking relief, but far from the end of the story.
At over two hours, “Love Me Tender” feels a little too long, especially once Clémence’s relationship with journalist Sarah (Monia Chokri) gets more serious. Chokri is slightly miscast and their relationship, despite a nicely frank sex scene involving the practiced use of a strap-on, is less convincing in its chemistry than, say, Clémence’s nightclub hookup with Victoire (an underused Park Ji-min from “Return to Seoul”). But time spent hanging out with Clémence and her flatmate Leo (Julien de Saint-Jean), or her father (Féofor Atkine) cannot feel wasted when Krieps’ inhabitation of the role is so complete. It’s an enormous, generous performance, even her body language changes — slinky and nonchalant when circling a new lover, loose-limbed and girlish when relaxing with friends, and tight and compressed in that horrible mediation room, her burners on low, her expression concentrated like she’s willing her heart to slow its beat.
After this year’s excellent “We Believe You” from Belgium and 2023’s “All to Play For” starring a terrific Virginie Efira, Francophone dramas following mothers embroiled in family court custody disputes are having quite a moment. “Love Me Tender” is a notable addition to the trend, for Krieps, but also for its sorrowful but stirring ending: Clémence makes a transgressive, devastatingly difficult decision, into which is woven the slenderest hope that, as we learn to appreciate loving mothers who are also complicated women, it may one day not seem so very transgressive at all.
