Love Me Tender review – Vicky Krieps custody-battle drama is intelligent, sensual and bitter slice of life
Anna Cazenave Cambet’s adaptation of Constance Debré’s novel is a superbly acted and affecting – if restrained – portrait of child access and interpersonal strife
Anna Cazenave Cambet’s adaptation of Constance Debré’s novel is a superbly acted and affecting – if restrained – portrait of child access and interpersonal strife 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.
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