‘Tell Her I Love Her’ review: Romane Bohringer confronts her own past in convoluted hybrid feature

Dir: Romane Bohringer. France. 2025. 92 mins

Motherhood and memory intertwine in Romane Bohringer’s complex, if at times convoluted, docufiction hybrid. Originally intended as a purely fictional adaptation, it stems from a friendship Bohringer developed with French politician Clémentine Autain after she appeared in Bohringer’s 2018 autofiction debut In The Move For Love and its subsequent TV series spin-off.

 Heartfelt but but inevitably niche

Autain went on to write the book ’Tell Her That I Love Her’ about her difficult relationship with her actor mother Dominique Laffin (The Crying Woman), who struggled with addiction and died at just 33, when Autain was a teenager. The book struck a chord with Bohringer, who was abandoned by her own mother, Marguerite Bourry, when she was just nine months old. The symmetries continued as Bourry also died at the young age of 36, when Bohringer was 14.

Actress-turned-filmmaker Bohringer and her co-writer Gabor Rassov take an ambitious approach to the material, mixing recreated scenes and documentary encounters as, inspired by Autain, Bohringer explores her own mother’s life and their relationship. The result is a heartfelt but but inevitably niche hybrid, which is likely to find its most appreciative audience in France where Bohringer and her actor father Richard – who appears as himself – are well known.  

In an exploration of mother/daughter dynamics driven by deconstruction and reconstruction, Bohringer explores how memories of childhood can cast a shadow long into adulthood – but may not tell the full story. Setting out her stall, the filmmaker includes screen tests from the likes of Julie Depardieu and Celine Sallette, as she tries to cast the role of Autain before realising it would be better for the French politician to appear as herself.

Autain reads segments from her book charting her troubled relationship with her mother, while Bohringer includes reconstructions of Autain’s childhood as well as her own. Eva Yelmani plays both Autain’s mother Laffin and Bohringer’s mother Bourry in scenes that are evocatively shot by Bertrand Mouly. Flashbacks involving Laffin use high colour that brings home the heightened sense of childhood emotions, including one scene in which a young Autain (Liliane Sanry-Baud) watches her mother’s drunken meltdown in a hotel bar. Bohringer’s memories are more hazy, represented by gauzily captured moments in which we do not see Bourry’s face.

These scenes, which generally revolve around chaos and rejection, appear periodically as Bohringer is prompted to begin to scrutinise her mother’s life more carefully, charting Bourry’s birth in Saigon and the French orphanage where she ended up being raised. Despite this already being a considerable number of techniques for one film to shoulder, Bohringer also includes interludes in which she speaks to a psychiatrist (Josiane Stoléru), and sections involving her teenage son Raoul Rebbot-Bohringer, dressed as a gumshoe detective, as he tries to help her investigate her past. While the latter adds a dab of levity and sweetness, these scenes feel thrown in for good measure rather than serving much purpose in terms of the women’s biographies.

There’s a sense of Bohringer attempting to retain the balance between her story and Autain’s but it proves tricky to maintain. The sheer number of devices being employed also means they sometimes feel more in competition than collaboration with one another, while the leaps between various elements of the film are not always smooth. Nevertheless Bohringer’s heartfelt and observant approach gives the film a strong emotional core.