‘Tell Her I Love Her’ Review: A Heartfelt if Unwieldy Exploration of the Legacies of Two Lost Mothers

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. With perhaps more ambition than rigor, her investigation leads Bohringer to layer meta-fiction onto auto-fiction onto docu-fiction, a scattershot approach that nonetheless gathers momentum and feeling as it goes. Finally, through otherwise potentially niche-interest personal histories, she accesses truths about mothers and daughters, memories and fallacies, that are far more universal. We cannot hope to fully understand a loved one whom we scarcely remember. But perhaps, through the act of remembering, we might better understand ourselves.

With a rather abrasive flurry of footage that creates a framing device out of TV reportage, home videos and an atypically precious voiceover, the film gets off to a shaky start, but soon there emerges the meta-meta narrative. Bohringer read Autain’s book — a pained interrogation of Autain’s fragmented relationship with her mother, actress Dominique Laffin, who died when Autain was a teenager — and was deeply struck by the resonances with her own life. Her mother, Marguerite Bourry, left when Bohringer was still a baby, and subsequently also died young, when Bohringer was just 14. Both mothers battled addiction, both orbited the bohemian creative class of their time, and both, we sense, chafed against the social mandate of traditional motherhood. Their now-adult daughters recognize that their unprocessed grief and hurt has resonated through their whole lives, perhaps crescendoing as their own kids reached the age they were when their mothers passed.

Bohringer not only gets Autain to allow her and her co-writer Gabor Rassov to mine the book for their film, but also to play herself. It’s the right decision: Autain’s coolly composed demeanor as she reads excerpts from her manuscript provides a nicely complementary contrast to Bohringer’s more demonstrative moments. It’s less clear why Bohringer chooses to include the unsuccessful auditions of several well-known actresses — Elsa Zylberstein, Julie Depardieu and Celine Sallette — for the part, unless it’s simply to add a little behind-the-scenes spice to the pot. But when we are already tracking the two contemporary women as well as piecing together their mothers’ stories in flashback dramatizations (in which Eva Yelmani is quite dazzling as the mercurial, magnetic Laffin), additionally shoehorning in a whole making-of aspect in the film feels cumbersome at best. 

It sits alongside other flourishes, like the strand in which Bohringer’s teenage son dresses up like a 1940s noir detective and lightens the mood with a little family-history sleuthing, and the inclusion of Bohringer’s sessions with a psychologist (Josiane Stoléru) that make overly explicit the whole project’s therapeutic remit. For a movie that aims to tear away and reveal, “Tell Her That I Love Her” very often layers on and conceals. But perhaps that concealment is itself illuminating. As Romane is told when she discusses the project with her father, Richard — himself a celebrated actor — “You are a child playing hide-and-seek, who doesn’t know what she fears or wants more: to stay hidden or to be found.” 

The inventiveness and eclecticism of Borhinger’s approach is refreshing, but the film’s greatest impact exists within certain strands, rather than in the collisions between them. 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. Not that the sorrowful documentary discoveries that Bohringer makes about Bourry’s troubled background would not also be worthy of their own, less distracted telling. 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. Because any woman may become a mother at some point in her life, but every woman is a daughter forever.