Cara-Lynn BranchThe director of Tell Her I Love Her, Romane Bohringer, is best known as an actor for works such as Savage Nights (she won the César Award for Most Promising Actress for her role), makes her sophomore feature with this personal exploration of her past, focusing on her relationship and memories of her mother. She does this through the lens of making a film adaptation of a story written by Clémentine Autain, Dites-lui que je l’aime, from which the film derives its title. While she does indeed adapt that story, it becomes part of a larger narrative of healing and re-examining the past.
What first appears to be a documentation of the making of a film or a narrative surrounding it transforms into something else after Bohringer completes the casting process of Autain’s doppelgängers and instead selects Autain to recount her story about her mother, actor Dominique Laffin. As she does so, the narrative truly begins to take shape. When she speaks, we witness the scenes unfold. These scenes are filmed in a manner that imbues them with a grain and colour grading, suggesting they take place in the past. Additionally, the scenes exhibit precise and crisp production design featuring a neat colour palette that often utilizes complementary colours. They are presented from the young girl’s perspective, yet crafted in typical filmic styles, using framing, angles, and shot composition. The scenes aim to depict the film that Bohringer, within the narrative, is meant to be creating from Autain’s work. However, these are not the only flashbacks presented to us. Simultaneously with these curated images of the past, we also see hazy images of Bohringer’s history from a first-person perspective as she reflects on her relationship with her mother, whom she also lost in her youth.
These first images from Bohringer’s memory and reflections on her mother are presented in a rather harsh light. Although she does not have many memories of her mother, the ones she does have and the feelings associated with them are unpleasant, which is why she has chosen not to think about them. However, as Autain discusses how she has re-examined her past and reframed her relationship with her mother, Bohringer’s film takes a turn as she seeks to fill in the gaps in her past and discovers aspects of her mother’s life that she never knew.
At this point, the film takes an investigative tone, uncovering past documents and visiting places of significance. Bohringer includes people who knew her mother, adding complexity to her image. People are not one-dimensional, and Bohringer can heal her past somewhat by revealing more about her mother’s history and the aspects of their relationship that she had stopped allowing herself to remember, as it was easier to focus on the negative after her mother’s death than to recall the moments of care.
The film is about healing, about closing the wounds of the past, and searching for a brighter future. It emphasizes that while both women felt a sense of loss for having missed out on the experience of having a mother present in their lives as they grew up, they look forward to getting older with their children and being that presence for them.
The film ends on a weird, discordant note, taking the kid private investigator we are presented with earlier (and it works earlier in the context), and sending him on a fantasy sequence. I understood what it was doing, but stylistically it felt so out of line with the rest of the film, and the prior sequence already provided a very satisfying narrative conclusion.
Tell Her I Love Her had its World Premiere in the Special Screenings section at the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival.
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