LOVE ME TENDER BY ANNA CAZENAVE CAMBET: A HEARTBREAKING PORTRAIT OF LOVE AND MOTHERHOOD

‘Love Me Tender’ is not just a film about queer love, but about the unbearable price of existing outside of what the world considers acceptable. Director Anna Cazenave Cambet captures pain with devastating delicacy. There is so much visual lyricism in every shot that the title barely begins to describe the brutal tenderness that runs through the entire film.

The movie tells the story of Clémence (Vicky Krieps), who, at the end of summer, tells her ex-husband (Antonine Reinartz) that she is trying romantic relationships with women. Her life is turned upside down when he is granted custody of their son. Clémence must fight to remain a mother and a free woman.

This film understands something that very few manage to capture honestly: many queer people survive thanks to love, while that same love also becomes the reason why the world wants them to disappear. The horror lies in the everyday, in the emotional and social judgement that makes a lesbian mother a bad person simply for trying to rebuild her life.

And that is where Vicky Krieps comes in with one of the most impressive performances of her career. Seeing her separated from her son, constantly forced to prove that she deserves to love and be a mother, is devastating. The scene where she finally sees Paul again broke me.

There is also something deeply truthful about how the film portrays men. Male emotional immaturity comes across as a banal destructive force: selfishness disguised as pride, anger turned into control. Antoine Reinartz once again plays an utterly unbearable man with too irritating precision. What is most chilling is that the story does not belong to a distant past. That makes the film even more painful: proof of how little the world has truly changed for many queer women.

Anna Cazenave Cambet’s direction feels like the emergence of a major filmmaker. There is a rare sensitivity in how she observes bodies and spaces; she never judges her characters, she simply accompanies them. Moreover, what a pleasure it is to see Monia Chokri continue to appear in projects that seem determined to revolutionize the contemporary queer cinematic experience.

‘Love Me Tender’ understands that family can be both a refuge and a curse. That loving someone can save and destroy someone at the same time. And that living against your own nature ends up being a slow way of fading away. It is a beautiful and deeply human film. One of those that leaves you thinking in your seat… and calling mom as soon as the credits roll.

Words by @joaquinxbc