by Viggo Ekman
Worth: $10.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Ella Rumpf, Monia Chokri, Noémie Lvovsky
Intro:
… calm and humane …
Love Letters opens with the passing of France’s same-sex marriage bill. In a film set somewhere else or at a different time, where such freedoms are still out of reach, this might have been a perfect happy ending. But here, it’s only the beginning.
Céline (Ella Rumpf) is expecting a child with her partner Nadia (Monia Chokri). Since Nadia is carrying the baby, she is recognised as the legal parent. However, despite Céline’s boundless desire to have a child, she must go through a difficult path to prove her legal right to the child.
This is Alice Douard’s feature debut, and its roots can be found in her 2022 short film Expecting. More than anything, Love Letters explores the challenges of same-sex couples when it comes to having and raising children. The film almost looks like an essay written in cinema language, stripped of clichés, and refusing to rely on the kind of melodramatic conflicts that often fuel dramas. With a calm and humane approach, the film tries to penetrate the depths of the mind of a woman who must prepare herself for something that neither she nor society is prepared for.
Good intentions aside, the film struggles to come alive. The three central figures—Céline, her mother (Noémie Lvovsky), and Nadia—remain sketchy and hard to grasp. Their next moves are impossible to predict, but not in a way that feels exciting. You rarely get a sense of what’s actually going on in their heads. Take Céline and Nadia’s endless quarrels and reconciliations: they happen so suddenly that they could just as well be cut or swapped around in the edit without making much difference. The bond between Céline and her mother is handled with more care, though, and since the film is about parenting, the parallels drawn between their relationship and Céline’s connection to her unborn child feel both meaningful and rewarding.
In addition, even though the film is not long, it is still full of unnecessary and drawn-out scenes. The screenplay has no hesitation in constantly pouring information into the mouths of the lawyer and the doctor, just to feed it to the audience. At other points, in the name of social duty, it sidelines drama altogether and simply places Céline and Nadia in homophobic situations to squeeze out a bit of emotion. When it does fall silent and tries to let the camera carry the weight, the effect rarely lands. Some of these attempts have music-video logic and in some others the camera tends to move in close to Céline’s face, as if expecting us to read her mind—but we are not mind readers.
The film also suffers from unintentionally ordinary images, never bringing much energy or meaning, and the editing—whether within a single scene or in the way one scene leads into the next—often falls flat. At times, whole sequences feel jarring due to a tone that clashes with what the script is reaching for.
Still, Love Letters succeeds in exploring a social issue that most would know little about; the struggles that same-sex couples face after marriage. It offers insights that matter—and makes sure that we walk away less likely to bother this community with the sort of clumsy questions that come from ignorance.
