Romane Bohringer is a French actor who, for her second film as director, has chosen to make an extremely personal story about her search for more information about her mother, Maggy, who left the family before she was a year old and died when Ms. Bohringer was in her early teens. It is also a meta-documentary about an attempt to make a film about the memoir Tell Her I Love Her, by the politician Clémentine Autain, about her own difficult relationship with her mother, a well-known actress named Dominique who died when Ms. Autain was 12. The discoveries Ms. Bohringer makes about both mothers are humdingers involving complicated issues of addiction, colonialism, exploitation and the damage caused by an absence of love. These double insights gives Tell Her I Love Her an unusual double impact, one that pushes it beyond individual stories into one with a larger meaning about identity, family and a child’s sense of self.
The first shock that Ms. Bohringer uncovers in her own family tree is the reason why her mother – who was born in Vietnam to a teenage prostitute and a French soldier father – was adopted. The second shock is that, on their return to France, the adoptive parents kept their adoptive son with them to raise and dumped Maggy in an orphanage run by nuns. They paid the fees but came to visit their daughter only a handful of times over the years. Much worse was to come; possibly the brightest window in Maggy’s life was after she met Ms. Bohringer’s father. As for Ms. Autain, there are scenes re-enacting some of her childhood memories of her mother (re-enacted by Eva Yelmani in a fearlessly ugly performance), a moody and occasionally violent alcoholic prepared to start fights in public, with her small daughter present, for a bottle of wine. Any sympathy you have for someone that overwhelmed by their addiction is counterbalanced by the impact on the little child watching. How Ms. Autain dispassionately explains the impact her mother’s behaviour continues to have on her life makes it easy for the audience to feel what she seemingly cannot allow herself to express.
Ms. Bohringer, who is partial to silver rings the size of her knuckles, treats all the bombshells – and they don’t stop coming – with a documentary resolve that’s surprising considering the personal nature of this work. The most serious misstep is the silliness over the closing credits, but that’s an act of indulgence for her preteen son Raoul Rebbot-Bohringer. The friendship between Ms. Autain and Ms. Bohringer is a surprise thanks to their very different personal politics, but losing your mother as a child means only others who have similarly lost their mothers can fully appreciate what you’ve experienced. It’s also surprising that Ms. Autain’s memoir seems to have been accepted by the French commentariat as a personal work completely separate from her political career, although it’s impossible to tell from the narrative here whether that’s really been the case. And since Ms. Autain’s parents were both celebrities, a memoir about life as their child would be interesting even if she had no public profile of her own.
Ms. Bohringer’s father, Richard Bohringer, has had his own successful career as an actor, and has documented his life in his own memoir, but of course Ms. Bohringer needed to do this for herself. A lost partner is one thing, but Maggy was her mother. The double narrative in the search for answers means it’s less bold though just as urgent-feeling as Sarah Polley’s similarly-themed documentary Stories We Tell, though the double surprise waiting for Ms. Bohringer is an incredible reminder of how our ability to keep secrets is changing with the times.
It’s still considered brave for a child to speak the truth about the people whose bodies made theirs. I’ll bet everyone reading this has a complex relationship with their own mother, meaning any movie, documentary or quasi-documentary or something else, that delves into mother-daughter relationships has a built-in audience. And while many women will watch this movie as a daughter wondering about the secrets their mothers are keeping, I wonder how many will watch this as mothers, considering what their legacy will be for their girls once they are gone.
Tell Her I Love Her (Dites-lui que je l’aime) recently played at the Cannes Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Cannes site for the title.
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