Love Me Tender review – Vicky Krieps custody-battle drama is intelligent, sensual and bitter slice of life

Vicky Krieps gives an intelligent, finely calibrated and sensitive performance in this marital-breakdown drama from writer-director Anna Cazenave Cambet. Cambet has adapted the autobiographical novel of the same title by Constance Debré, about her bitter experience of being denied contact with her young son after her marriage breakup – at the same time quitting her job in law and then coming out as gay, and also becoming a writer (these things apparently held against her in France’s patriarchal family courts).

Krieps mimics the author’s elegant, close-cropped hairstyle in the film’s final act, and is never anything other than excellent. But I wondered sometimes if, in the course of this slightly prolix movie, the reserve and control required from her by the material were quite doing full justice to the extraordinary 18-month ordeal of not being able to see your own child.

Well, perhaps that opacity is what you need to survive, when emotionalism would be held against you, and interpreted as instability. And there is something inspired in the movie’s final internal monologue, heard in voiceover as Krieps’s character is cycling through the streets, wondering if she is emerging from a “mourning” period for her son. There is another flash of inspiration from the director in contriving things so that the first clear look we get of her son’s face is an hour into the film, at the first court-supervised contact meeting.

Krieps is Clémence, whose shared arrangements around her son Paul (Viggo Ferreira-Redier) with her ex-partner Laurent (Antoine Reinartz) are amicable enough until she reveals to him that she is now dating women. Something in her new sexual identity, and the fact that she having some success as a writer describing it, triggers a spiteful rage in Laurent, who turns Paul against his own mother. He applies for sole access, coercing their son into writing a bogus deposition statement attacking Clémence. He succeeds in denying access for a year and a half.

Clémence defiantly tries to resist the bullying, to continue with her life of sensual openness, honesty and artistic expression, in effect biting her tongue in the face of state-sanctioned homophobia. She finally discovers some intimacy with Sarah (Monia Chokri), while also trying to look after her elderly, ailing father (Féodor Atkine). Clémence gradually gains some access to Paul, talking to him while two court officers are present, and finally gets to take him out on her own for a gleeful bike ride (but thank heavens Laurent’s lawyers didn’t see that they had no helmets).

In its moment-by-moment transcription of the crushing banality of this kind of injustice, the film is offering a bitter slice of life. I wasn’t sure about Paul’s flash of anger in one of the “contact” scenes when he tips the chair over and then Clémence does the same thing; it is a rare moment of actorly discomfort for Krieps. But again, perhaps this sort of discomfort, this half-hearted bad art in the midst of real life, is authentic in its way.

As for Laurent, he is a mystery: petulant, angry, resentful. There is a strange moment when he opens the apartment door to Clémence, and we glimpse two rather forbidding men inside. These are his lawyer and friend, there at his request as witnesses to any of Clémence’s supposed bad behaviour, although we never hear any more of them. Perhaps there could be another story to tell – perhaps even a sympathetic story – about the pathos of Laurent and his suspicions. This is an intelligent, sophisticated, sensual movie that never quite arrives at the explosively passionate moment it appears to promise.