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‘Tell Her I Love Her’ Review: A Heartfelt if Unwieldy Exploration of the Legacies of Two Lost Mothers
Director Romane Bohringer uses a meta-auto-fictional approach in "Tell Her I Love Her" to dramatize two parallel stories of daughterly grief.
The pleasures and the pitfalls of a hybrid format are both in evidence in French actress-turned-director Romane Bohringer ‘s “ Tell Her I Love Her,” a plaintive, affecting account of her struggle to come to terms with her mother’s abandonment, refracted through the similar experiences of politician, activist and author Clémentine Autain. Given Yelmani’s terrific turn in the dramatized recreations of Autain’s memories of her mother, and the lovely grainy warmth DP Bertrand Mouly brings to those sections so they look like images worn soft and saturated with constant recall, there’s a case to be made for a version of Laffin’s story rendered as pure fiction. Then again, perhaps the real strength of the convoluted but quietly moving “Tell Her I Love Her” is not its examination of absent, erratic motherhood but of ongoing, inescapable daughterhood and that is how it delivers a more generously insightful experience than its intimate premise suggests.
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