Love Me Tender: a ‘heartbreakingly vivid’ family drama

A woman is “torn between motherhood and selfhood, duty and freedom” in this “brutal custody drama” based on a bestselling work of autofiction by the French writer Constance Debré, said India Lawrence on Time Out.

Vicky Krieps plays Clémence, “a make-up-free, short-haired, scooter-riding ex-lawyer” who has abandoned her successful legal career to become a writer. She has an amicable relationship with her former husband Laurent (Antoine Reinartz), with whom she shares custody of their eight-year-old son, Paul. But when Clémence tells Laurent that she is now dating women, he claims she is an unfit mother and files for sole custody. There follows a years-long battle “fuelled by Laurent’s infuriating, and borderline evil, determination to take Paul away from Clémence entirely”. It makes for a “compelling” film that is “utterly enraging” too.

The film “hits its mark with painful accuracy”, said Jessica Kiang in Variety. While Clémence tries to carry on with her professional and romantic life, she is consumed by the “near full-time job of fighting through a legal quagmire”. For 18 months, she is denied access to her son – and even after that, she’s restricted to brief sessions under supervision.

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I wasn’t totally convinced, said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in The Times. Clémence’s passivity sometimes feels “implausible”, and the lengthy scenes set in queer techno nightclubs could have done with a “good snip”. Yet Krieps keeps it all “compelling”, as her character “contracts into something pale, shaven-headed and almost saint-like”, a “warrior, victim and fugitive from feeling”; and the relationship between mother and son is “heartbreakingly vivid”. You will be hooked “right up to its unpredictable, provocative ending”.