Love Me Tender (2025) ‘Cinemania’ Movie Review: Quiet Resilience in the Face of Queer Parental Persecution

A truly dedicated parent will do just about anything—change just about anything—for the sake of their child. What they can’t do, however, is change who they are, and with “Love Me Tender,” Anna Cazenave Cambet reinforces an oft-ignored truth that comes with this impenetrable drive for self-sacrifice: some things, despite (latent) systemic pressures, shouldn’t even have to change in a parent’s life for them to be a fitting guardian.

The application of this truth, though, is far more difficult to solidify than it should be, and even in this age of perceived tolerance towards all sexualities, fear of nonconformity remains a weapon to be wielded by the cruelest among us, and one which stings the hardest when the blow comes from the most unsuspecting of hands. “Love Me Tender” exposes this cutting brutality with a relentless fury towards the nonchalance of this injustice, but through it all, Cambet never once wavers from the titular sentiments that fuel this primal frustration in the heart of a mother made a recluse in the life of her son through everyone’s will but her own.

Clémence (Vicky Krieps) is the victim of such maltreatment, made all the more devastating by just how suddenly these fences spring up to box her in as her son Paul’s (Viggo Ferreira-Redier) life passes her by. “Love Me Tender” begins deceptively enough, with Clémence’s amicable relationship with Paul’s father, Laurent (Antoine Reinartz). Despite having been separated for years, the couple has, until now, avoided divorce proceedings for the sake of Paul’s wellbeing, establishing instead their own alternating timetable for equitable time spent with him.

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This all changes after an innocuous enough lunch date between the parents, when Clémence announces that she has, since their separation, begun to date women. Laurent is slightly taken aback, but remains friendly enough until their engagement comes to an end. It takes until her next scheduled week with Paul, however, for Clémence to discover that the difficulty in making this announcement extends well beyond the personal courage she needed to tell him at all. Paul is suddenly furious with his mother, refusing to leave with her, and it isn’t long before Laurent officially files for divorce with the intention of obtaining sole custody of their son.

This blasé sense of cruelty towards the woman with whom he spent 20 loving years is the first stab to the chest, but “Love Me Tender” proceeds to spend the next two hours twisting the knife as Clémence’s sexuality—her noncommitted sexual encounters and liberated sense of pride representation—are used as weapons not only by Laurent and his lawyer, but by the legal system to reinforce a suffocatingly restricted timetable for her to visit Paul.

It isn’t long before a full two years pass without Clémence ever having had the opportunity to see her son grow, and Cambet allows the oppressiveness of this wait to be reflected in the film’s pacing. Little screen-time has passed before this first(!) time-jump, but every moment of the mother’s restriction is felt like a noose wrapped firmly around your throat. As she narrates early on, “Three years is 1,000 years,” and each second spent in this hellishly unfair situation feels like 20 seconds too long to bear.

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Krieps carries almost every single frame of “Love Me Tender,” and does so with the most dynamically intimate and tortured frustration since her turn in 2021’s “Hold Me Tight.” Every new setback must be taken on the chin, lest her more-than-justified exasperation be leveraged as a sign of instability in the eyes of social services, and Krieps illustrates the constant battle with her own default expressions with every shift of her cheek muscles; so too is every one of Clemence’s small gasps for air inhaled with every ounce of dignity Krieps can muster from the constant humiliation this woman faces.

This part is especially important, as the glue that holds “Love Me Tender” together is Cambet’s willingness to let Clémence’s sexual and romantic encounters continue in the wake of this injustice, showing how the very ammunition used against her in court shouldn’t be a stranglehold on her life. As her lesbianism becomes an unspoken hurdle in her quest for regained custody, she still searches for intimacy where she can and enjoys the culture of LGBTQ+ spaces. More than anything, it’s this time spent with Clémence that shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that her shedding this part of her humanity—a part that affects nobody but herself—would be just as much of a defeat as its current use against her.

Still, the horrific imbalance of the courts proves a weight, at times, far too heavy to bear (much like Maxine Dussère’s overbearing score), and every attempt Clémence makes to sanitize the outside perception of her life merely emphasizes the atrocity of this deception’s necessity at all. Cambet and Krieps see in “Love Me Tender” a symbiosis of resilience and defeat, glued together in their own tender embrace by the tears that flow down from the shoulder and stain like the worst nosebleed.

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Love Me Tender (2025) Movie Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia, Letterboxd
Love Me Tender (2025) Movie Cast: Vicky Krieps, Antoine Reinartz, Viggo Ferreira-Redier, Monia Chokri
Love Me Tender (2025) Runtime: 2h 14m, Genre: Drama

Where to watch Love Me Tender