Love Me Tender review: Vicky Krieps excels in heartbreaking drama
I’ve always thought Vicky Krieps was an excellent actress, ever since she first came to my attention with Phantom Thread, but she really blew me away in Love Me Tender.
In this French drama, written and directed by Anna Cazenave Cambet, she plays Clémence, who shares an eight-year-old son named Paul (Viggo Ferreira-Redier) with her estranged husband Laurent (Antoine Reinartz). In the three years since she left their 20-year relationship, they have stayed friends and amicable co-parents. But everything changes when Clémence reveals she’s started dating women and wants a divorce. Laurent turns into someone she doesn’t recognise; someone who will use their son as a pawn to hurt her.
Soon after her revelation, she goes to Laurent’s apartment to collect Paul for her designated week, but he refuses to see her. After six months of this, Laurent initiates a legal battle and pursues sole custody, claiming she is an unfit mother, beginning a years-long fight to see her son.
Love Me Tender is a heartbreaking, infuriating film (complimentary) because it gives you a real insight into how unjust and slow the custody and child services system is, both in France and around the world. How can one parent get away with withholding access to their child and cancelling official visitations for months on end?! It’s hard to reconcile the friendly and chatty Laurent of the first act with the petty, pathetic and vindictive person he becomes. He is using Paul to punish her and can’t see that he’s effing up his son’s life in the process. Usually it’s a man in Clémence’s position, so it’s interesting to see a mother battling the unfair system. Nothing gets resolved quickly – paperwork can take years – and it’s absolutely maddening.
The film is quite long at 2 hours and 15 minutes and I did feel the runtime occasionally, but it is warranted. It covers a substantial stretch of time (although it’s sometimes unclear how much time has passed) and it depicts Clémence’s full life and how this custody battle affects every aspect, such as her relationships with women, including Sarah (Monia Chokri), and her finances. Krieps narrates the film in random bursts, reading passages from writer Clémence’s autobiographical book.
Krieps has crafted such a full-bodied, lived-in character who feels so alive and real. The actress captures Clémence’s distress, anguish and frustration. She’s grieving her son and the life she expected to have. She clings onto hope every time a visitation is booked in and has to wait and see if Laurent will respect their arrangement this time. But it’s not all doom and gloom; Clémence has friends, success as a writer and experiences love and pleasure. The custody battle dominates her life and clouds everything but she still has some joy.
Love Me Tender, based on the 2020 autobiographical novel by Constance Debré, is a beautifully written and emotionally deep, rich and complex drama with an outstanding performance from Krieps.
In cinemas from Friday 7th August