“An imperfect but deeply felt gesture of forgiveness and reconciliation with ghosts of the past.”

For her second directorial outing, veteran actress Romane Bohringer takes a unique approach to a project that on paper reads as difficult if not impossible. In her 2019 memoir Dites-lui que je l’aime (Tell Her That I Love Her), French politician Clémentine Autain recounts her chaotic childhood with her mother Dominique Laffin, a French actress who briefly shot to fame in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and how her mental illness and severe alcohol and drug addiction left a lasting impact on Autain even after her mother’s death in 1985. The memoir, a fractured mix of hazy memories and addresses from Autain to the mother that she barely knew and still struggles to understand as an adult, isn’t structured in a way that lends itself well to a film adaptation, so Bohringer’s choice to make a quasi-documentary that combines reenactments, film and interview clips, home movies, and personal recollections is an appropriate one. In connecting Autain’s childhood to her own, Bohringer has created a film that, while awkwardly fusing two stories together, contains an emotional impact that builds over the course of the film, leading to an extremely moving reflection on these two women’s pasts and futures.

The film’s first half develops each woman’s story in parallel. We follow Romane as she decides to adapt the book, meets with Clémentine, and records several screen tests (with Céline Sallette, Julie Depardieu, and her Mina Tannenbaum co-star Elsa Zylberstein) before deciding that the best approach is to have Clémentine herself recount her childhood. Romane also attends sessions with a psychiatrist (Josiane Stoléru) as she faces her own complicated relationship with her late mother. Combining Clémentine’s childhood memories with readings from the memoir alongside Romane’s reflections of her own childhood, this part of the film is somewhat didactic and clunky, seemingly unsure of which woman is the primary focus. Romane’s story is an intrusion on Clémentine’s own, as if desperate to make every connection (no matter how small) between the two women immediately clear rather than letting them unfold organically. The use of reenactments here is also a mixed bag: in showing us Clémentine and Romane’s childhood memories, they are shot and acted with an exaggerated, stilted quality, as if they are very obviously reenactments rather than an organic flashback. This is of a piece with how this half of the film emphasizes the labor that goes into making a film, but holds these scenes back from being as emotionally potent as they could be, despite stirring testimony from both Clémentine and Romane.

Once the second half switches focus to Romane’s journey to uncover her mother’s history, the film takes on a much stronger emotional resonance. As both she and the viewer learn more about Maggy – a French-Vietnamese woman born near the end of French colonialism in Vietnam and who spent her entire life suffering from a sense of not belonging, not existing – the film becomes a powerful tale of maternal heritage, and the pain and joy that can come with learning more about family history and who our parents are as people rather than just ‘mum’ and ‘dad’. Romane, reluctant to question her father (the actor Richard Bohringer) about her mother, instead finds herself going through Maggy’s personal writings, discovering a life of mistreatment and abandonment at the hands of adoptive French parents who had no idea how to raise a mixed-race child, leaving her to an orphanage and only reclaiming her once she became old enough to provide manual labor for them. While there is a deep sadness to this part of the film, as it becomes clear just how much Maggy was affected by her treatment as an ‘outsider’ and the fact that she did not even exist according to the French government, there are also moments of tenderness: Romane employing her adolescent son Raoul to play the role of a detective who encourages her to follow the trail of her mother’s life; Romane reconnecting with newly discovered family members; and Romane and Clémentine coming together at the end of the film, showing how this project has been a source of healing for them.

Tackling difficult subject matter, Bohringer and Autain don’t shy away from how their mothers – despite both women deeply loving their daughters – were extremely ill-equipped for the responsibilities that being a mother entailed, a problem exacerbated by addiction and mental health issues. But despite the scars left by their childhood and losses that can never fully heal, both women show a remarkable amount of grace and resilience, coming to terms with who their mothers were and determined to break the cycle of abandonment and negligent parenting with their own children. Loving a parent who died young and who didn’t know how to be a parent can be difficult, yet Bohringer and Autain have crafted here an imperfect but deeply felt gesture of forgiveness and reconciliation with these ghosts of the past.