Vicky Krieps has spent her career playing women who refuse to shrink themselves – and her latest role might be the sharpest yet. In Love Me Tender, out in UK and Irish cinemas on 7 August, she plays Clémence, a mother forced to prove she’s fit to raise her own child after falling in love with a woman. It is not, unfortunately, a story that feels remote.
What Love Me Tender is about
Directed by Anna Cazenave Cambet and adapted from Constance Debré’s bestselling novel, the film follows Clémence, a former lawyer turned writer, sharing custody of her son Paul with her ex-husband Laurent (Antoine Reinartz). The post-divorce arrangement is careful and amicable. Then Clémence meets Sarah (Monia Chokri), begins living as an openly queer woman, and Laurent files for sole custody.
What follows is a legal system asking a mother to justify her private life. The film premiered at Cannes and had its UK launch at the BFI London Film Festival.
The book behind the film
Debré’s source novel is autofiction. She left a career in law, came out, and lost her son in a custody battle that mirrors the one on screen. That grounding matters. Custody-after-coming-out is not a period piece or an imaginary threat – it is a route queer mothers have been forced down for decades, and it still happens. Watching a film that puts that experience in a mainstream cinema, in the hands of an actor as watchable as Krieps, is not nothing.
What the critics are saying
Variety’s Jessica Kiang described Krieps’ performance as “rivetingly radiant”. Le Monde said she was “heartbreaking”. AnOther Mag called the film “an insurgent meditation on motherhood”.
The trailer
The details
- Title: Love Me Tender
- Director: Anna Cazenave Cambet
- Based on the novel by Constance Debré
- Starring: Vicky Krieps, Monia Chokri, Antoine Reinartz
- Certificate: 15
- Running time: 134 minutes
- UK & Irish cinemas: 7 August 2026
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This article was written by one of our creative team writers here at Nonchalant Magazine.
