Tell Her That I Love Her Review: Understanding the Mothers We Barely Knew

Romane Bohringer’s “Tell Her That I Love Her” unfurls not merely as a film, but as an act of intimate archaeology, a daughter’s painstaking excavation of maternal ghosts. Its conception, sparked by Clémentine Autain’s memoir of an identically titled sorrow, immediately signals a departure from conventional cinema. This is a work born from a shared wound: the premature loss of a mother whose life was a whirlwind of artistic ambition and profound personal struggle.

The film beckons us into an emotional terrain where memory is both a sanctuary and a minefield, a deeply personal quest to map the contours of a love irrevocably shaped by absence. It’s a quiet, insistent grappling with legacies that whisper from just beyond the veil of the past.

Duets of Daughterly Bereavement

The film’s structural conceit—a dual biography of grief—finds Bohringer not just adapting Autain’s narrative but weaving her own strikingly similar story into its fabric. Autain’s mother, the actress Dominique Laffin, and Bohringer’s own mother, Marguerite “Maggy” Bourry, become twinned specters; both artistic souls, both consumed too young by their demons (addiction a recurring, somber motif), both leaving behind daughters to assemble a cohesive memory from fragments.

Autain’s presence, recounting her history directly to the camera, lends a raw verisimilitude. The project shifts, then, from simple adaptation to a kind of dialogic mourning. It’s less a straightforward telling and more an echo chamber where two histories of abandonment and artistic, troubled motherhood reverberate, asking if shared experience can truly lighten an individual burden, or if it simply creates a more populated loneliness. The screen becomes a space where the particular sorrows of Bohringer and Autain seek a form of universal expression.

The Filmic Seance: Reanimating Memory’s Fragments

Bohringer’s method is a curious, almost alchemical blend of documentary candor and staged artifice—a sort of mnemofiction, if you will. Reenactments of childhood, filtered through the unreliable lens of time, possess a deliberate stylization: Autain’s memories pulse with a heightened, almost lurid color, befitting the sharp traumas of youth, while Bohringer’s own are more ethereal, hazy, their subject often just out of clear view.

This isn’t realism; it’s an admission of memory’s inherent theatricality. The inclusion of Bohringer’s screen tests with other actresses (a meta-nod to the constructed nature of all on-screen portrayal), her filmed psychiatric sessions (baring the therapeutic undercurrent, perhaps a little too readily), and even the whimsical casting of her son as a pint-sized detective aiding her maternal investigation, all underscore the performative aspect of this self-exploration.

It’s as if the past can only be approached through a series of carefully arranged reflections, each technique a different mirror angled towards an elusive truth, reflecting our contemporary obsession with processing trauma through the prism of public display.

Excavating the Mother Lode: Colonial Ghosts and Personal Demons

The film truly bites down when Bohringer turns the investigative lens fully onto her own mother, Maggy Bourry. Here, the personal expands, touching the raw nerves of history. Maggy’s story—a Vietnamese-French child of colonial Indochina, adrift through adoption, orphanages, and a French society that seemed to have no official space for her existence—is a potent emblem of displacement.

Her life, marked by a desperate desire “to exist” amidst systemic erasure and the eventual succor (and scourge) of addiction, provides a disquieting counterpoint to the more public narratives of artistic struggle. The film doesn’t flinch from the grim realities of the mothers’ addictions (heroin, alcohol) or the profound emotional disarray they inflicted.

We witness the daughters cycling through a complex spectrum of feeling—confusion, sorrow, flashes of anger, and an enduring, aching love. The absent mother becomes less a person, more a pervasive atmosphere, a question mark branded onto their identities, forcing a confrontation with the intergenerational transmission of pain – a societal issue often swept under the rug of familial discretion.

The Imperfect Path to Forgiveness

Ultimately, “Tell Her That I Love Her” charts a course towards a tentative, bruised form of understanding. The filmmaking process itself morphs into a tangible act of reclamation for Bohringer, a way to parent herself by re-parenting the memory of her mother.

As she delves deeper into Maggy’s hidden history, confronting painful truths and suppressed emotions, there’s a palpable shift. It’s not about finding easy answers or saccharine closure (thankfully, the film is too honest for that). Instead, it’s about arriving at an empathy for these women, not just as mothers, but as individuals fractured by their own histories and limitations.

There’s a courage in this, in showing that forgiveness, if it comes, is often a ragged, incomplete thing. The film offers a quiet testament to the resilience required to sift through familial wreckage, not to perfectly reconstruct, but perhaps to build something new and a little more stable from the inherited shards, a message with quiet cultural reverberations in an age grappling with how to speak of, and perhaps mend, broken lineages.

Tell Her That I Love Her premiered in the Special Screenings section at the 78th Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2025.

Full Credits

Director: Romane Bohringer

Writers: Romane Bohringer, Gábor Rassov

Producers: Escazal Films (France)

Cast: Romane Bohringer, Clémentine Autain, Eva Yelmani

International Sales: Kinology