FILM OF THE WEEK: Love Me Tender - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

In Ireland and the UK, two campaigns are currently seeking to explore how the family courts are often weaponised against women, and how unrealistic ideals of perfect and respectable motherhood are used to police them – and this subject is wonderfully explored in Anna Cazenave Cambet's Love Me Tender.

The film opens as a wrenching custody drama about a mother fighting to regain access to her son after her ex-husband weaponises the French family courts against her. But its real subject is something thornier: the impossible standards placed on women, and particularly mothers, when they dare to have a life, desires and an identity beyond motherhood.

Adapted from Constance Debré's autobiographical novel, the film follows Clémence (Phantom Thread actress Vicky Krieps), a former lawyer who has left both her prestigious career and her marriage behind. She is beginning to write, embracing a freer life, and tentatively exploring relationships with women when her ex-husband Laurent (Antoine Reinartz) learns she is dating women. His response is one of vicious insecurity disguised as concern for their young son, Paul, in the way that bad-faith “think of the children” arguments have always been used to police women and queer people. Laurent rapidly turns the courts into instruments of punishment, stripping Clémence of access to her son.

The film is unmistakably an indictment of a legal system that reinforces patriarchal assumptions. Laurent never has to prove himself the better parent, while Clémence is forced to defend every aspect of her identity. Her sexuality, her rejection of a respectable legal career, her modest apartment, her writing, her lovers, and even her independence become evidence against her. Love Me Tender suggests that for women, particularly queer women, the definition of a "good mother" remains impossibly narrow.

Yet what makes Cambet's film so compelling is that it refuses to simplify Clémence into either martyr or saint. She is not interested in becoming the ideal victim. She can be distant, stubborn, emotionally withholding and occasionally difficult to understand. Reminiscent of 2021’s The Lost Daughter starring Olivia Colman, the film quietly asks whether, for Clémence, reclaiming herself is just as essential as reclaiming motherhood.

Vicky Krieps embodies Clémence’s complexity brilliantly, bringing restraint, some opacity and importantly, control. Clémence knows that she cannot afford emotional collapse, knows that every tear, outburst and moment of fallible humanity will be used against her. Krieps instead conveys extraordinary grief through tiny microexpressions and a tension in her body suggesting she is holding in so much of herself. This idea of performance becomes heartbreaking during scenes of supervised visits with her son, where both of them are agonisingly aware of the performance required of them, and the distance that creates between them. In contrast, scenes where Clémence is allowed to be herself, with lovers or out in the world, feel like flashing moments of liberation.

The performances impress but at well over two hours, Love Me Tender become sluggish. The episodic structure, following Clémence through various romantic encounters alongside the legal battle, becomes slightly repetitive and dilutes the central drama. Nor does Laurent emerge as a fully rounded antagonist. While the film is clearly centred on Clémence's experience, a fuller exploration of Laurent's vindictiveness might have made its portrait of institutional misogyny even more unsettling.

But the film remains impactful in not just showing the cruelty of the custody battle and its exploration of how institutions can police female identity, but the broader question it poses about womanhood itself. Society readily celebrates mothers who erase themselves for their children, but is far less comfortable with mothers who insist on remaining artists, lovers, sexual beings – or simply complicated, fully-rounded people. For those who enjoyed Laura Dern's famous "God is the father, and God didn't show up" speech in A Marriage Story and want to see the reality of it played out onscreen: this is your film.

In an era when debates around family courts, parental rights and women's autonomy feel increasingly urgent across Europe, Love Me Tender resonates well beyond its French setting. Intelligent; humane; and quietly, necessarily furious.

Written and directed by Anna Cazenave Cambet, based on the novel Love Me Tender by Constance Debré. Cinematography by Kristy Baboul. Edited by Joris Laquittant. Music by Maxence Dussère.

Starring Vicky Krieps, Monia Chokri, Antoine Reinartz, Viggo Ferreira-Redier. 133 mins.

In cinemas now.