Reviews of Love Me Tender (which premiered at the Cannes film festival last summer) describe it as a film about motherhood. This description is not inaccurate, but it is importantly limited. Love Me Tender is in part a story of two parents fighting over custody. Vicky Krieps plays Clemence, a mother struggling with a manipulative ex-husband who is disgusted and enraged by his former wife’s sexual and romantic interest in women and ruthless in his attempts to strip her of any relationship with their son, Paul.
But the film is fundamentally concerned with something else, and the clue to that fundamental interest is in its title. Love Me Tender is not shy about its primary subject: love itself. The film was inspired by a celebrated work of the same name — a novel of auto-fiction by Constance Debré which appeared in 2020. Like the novel, the protagonist of the film’s story is on a quest to defy conventional definitions of motherhood while also straining to healthily love not only her son but her lovers, her friends, her life choices, and also herself. She is a mother, but before she is a mother she is a woman.
Love Me Tender just had its United States premiere at the American French Film Festival in Los Angeles. Below is the exchange I had with Krieps after the film’s premier in Cannes this past summer.
The film “is almost like an ode to love,” Krieps told me. “Questioning love but also celebrating love. An honest questioning of love. Liberating yourself is a form of self-love but also love for everyone around you. You liberate yourself not only for yourself. Stepping out of the mother’s role means also giving the liberty back to her son. She gives him the freedom to be a free person.”
Honesty and liberation are important to Krieps and not just in the context of this film. Each time I or other journalists asked her a question she would pause, ponder, apparently at pains to rise to each question and to honor her character. Unperturbed by the buzz of the festival around us (Jody Foster passed by at some point), she gave herself over to our conversation.
Her career bears the marks of a similar sincere thoughtfulness. The 42-year-old Luxembourgish actress found worldwide renown with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017.) But she never developed a taste for American-centered, commercialized movie business. She chose instead to become a darling of European arthouse cinema (Krieps is fluent in German, French and English). She expertly portrayed both Jenny Marx in The Young Karl Marx (2017) and Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Corsage (2022,) — two contemporaneous German-speaking women who could hardly be more different. Her many other roles include a conflicted filmmaker in Bergman Island (2021) and a dying 33-year-old woman in More Than Ever (2022.) She has chosen difficult roles, roles that challenge the audiences just as they challenge the actors who conjure these stories to life. It would have been possible for Krieps to transition to Hollywood and settle for simpler, high-paying projects but her impressive and weighty oeuvre suggests she has exerted effort to remain committed to her own sense of artistic integrity. In this way she is not unlike Clemence in Love Me Tender.
Clemence is a characteristic role for Krieps because the character is difficult in the way that people who take the responsibility of being a human seriously are both difficult to be and to be around. They experience life at a higher intensity than others.
“I chose this project because when I read the first line of the script, I was hit by its powerful honesty,” she says. “I mean real honesty. It is really about the courage of the few people in this world who dare to speak the truth. And Clemence is truthful about women and mothers in a way that really very few people are.”
The imperative to be honest has weighed on her in her own life, both as a mother and as an actor. She explained that, just like the Clemence of the book and the film, Krieps too wanted to become a mother in her own way. But once you make that choice, “you are confronted with the rules of society and you realize that you are not actually allowed to do it your way.” Since separating from the father of her two children Krieps has zealously maintained an excellent relationship with her children, over whom she has shared custody. Just like Clemence, “doing it my way means putting friendship over motherhood. I want to be friends with my kids, I don’t only want to be their mother,” she continued. “I want to respect them and I want them to respect me but I don’t want them to respect me because I am their mother. I was going to live like this and I think I still am. But I always get criticized for it.”
Society functions in part to flatten idiosyncrasies for the general good and this flattening pressure is applied outside of motherhood as well. In the film, Clemence’s decision to give up a high-paying salary as a lawyer to instead live in a modest apartment and write experimental books is what tips the balance in the legal custody fight against her. I told Krieps that the film seemed relevant to people roughly our age (we are five years apart), and for us these challenges amount to little less than an early mid-life crisis.
“Absolutely,” she told me. “I gave a speech the other day, on women and film. I was approached afterwards not just by women but men, saying they realized that you can step out of social constraints. You are given one life. You are allowed to choose how you live it. We don’t have to stick to a role because someone gave it to us, and that’s true in some way even in childhood. Society assigns us a part to play and we are supposed to want to play it as well as we can and we are supposed to want to go up the ladder someone else put in front of us and not go down and wander off. We are supposed to want more money and then more roles like that first one only better versions by which we are meant to mean higher paying. No one tells us that we can step away. This is what Clemence does. She says I don’t want the money. I don’t want the bourgeois apartment. I don’t want the applause of my family for being a good mother. I want to be honest.”
When I asked her if her artistic choices were symptomatic of a similar honesty and zeal, Krieps was visibly moved. Her eyes glistened.
“I think there is a very true similarity,” she confides. “We live in a world where it’s more and more about money and superficiality and we are supposed to be interested in how successful we are. I am supposed to be interested in how much you like me and if I am beautiful and I try so much all my life to not give in to that. And hold on to what I believe is true. Even if I am not sure what I believe is true is actually true.”
It is tragic, in Krieps’s view, that so much of the cultural world eschews her view.
“It makes me sad,” she tells me. “It makes me alone. I don’t want to be alone. I didn’t want it to be something we have to talk about. It should be art. It should be that festivals like this exist in service to art. And I see that Cannes is staged to give artists a voice and visibility but it is used by people who want to sell you ice cream and products.”
Krieps is not always sure about her choices.
“I doubt it every day,” she tells me. “I am wondering if I was wrong. I look around and see all the nice things people can buy. And I have doubts about the risk I am taking. I have two kids and I don’t have financial stability. I am hustling the whole time. Sometimes I wonder what if I get sick? These life choices foster incessant insecurity.”
In the film, Clemence suffers from relentless backlash for her choices, and that backlash is generated first and foremost by her ex husband.
Krieps explained how she tried to understand that figure and the role he played in the film: “He doesn’t accept that she is honest and that she doesn’t say ‘I love you’ to him anymore. We talked a lot about this with my acting partner Antoine Reinarz [Laurent.] He probably still loves her and can’t accept that she doesn’t reciprocate. Not only that but she also dates and sleeps with other people and those other people happen to be women. What that represents is her emancipation. I’ve never been with women but I’ve been with younger men and that’s also sort of a taboo. People can’t help but ask if you are reliving your puberty. They experience your personal life as an attack on their ego! I think Laurent also has a problem with his ego. Seeing her enjoying herself, living her life the way she wants to, without him and without being ashamed and even writing a book about it! Right in the open, she is showing everyone that it’s possible to live your life as a full person.”
I asked Krieps about her method. Playing in a few intense projects every year, how does she move from one intense role to another quite different one? I asked if she is a student of Stanislavski’s method acting or if she uses other techniques to assist in her transformations. Her answer was fascinating – Krieps changed herself and her relationship with acting in order to meet the challenges her career imposed.
“Being a young mother and an actress forced me to find my own way,” she said. “Because I didn’t have time or money to prepare in a way that I thought actors prepared. Like to go swimming for a year if you are swimming in the film. I don’t have time for that stuff. I need to also be a mother. So how could I make my weakness my strength? Instead of going outside, I went inside. Instead of trying to construct, I started deconstructing. When I went to do Phantom Thread, I realized I am not actually weaker because of this. It’s true strength because it led me to a place where, because I didn’t have time to build the edifice, the core had to be there even more. So I started becoming really good at perfecting this state: I feel myself and I try to be just very pure and in the moment and let things come to me from my script or my partner or from places I don’t even know. My method became this non-method that I think is very useful.”
Consistent with this attestation, Krieps made a point of not meeting up with the author upon whom her own character was based: “Whenever I play someone who has existed, I try to not meet them before and I do my best not to know anything about them. Because it’s important to me. I don’t want this to be an exercise in good acting. Like ‘look how well I am copying this person.’ By not knowing who they are, I use as the tools the circumstances they are in, trusting that I probably end up in the same place they ended up by being confronted with the same circumstances.”
When asked about Debre’s character, Krieps said: “My intuition told me that inside of her is a big softness. Because a lot of people who read the book speak of her hardness. But when I read the book, I kept feeling that there is something soft and that was my intuition. After we finished filming, I met her. I had this feeling again that behind her eyes, I can feel this softness.”
I could say the same about Vicky Krieps, having watched her on screen for years, after meeting her in person. She radiates a humane softness encased in iron which allows her to project both strength and humility. This is what is required of a great actor and of an artist committed to art for its own sake, especially in a time and in a professional context in which there is no framework for that kind of integrity. The word “Cannes,” like “Hollywood,” conjures images of a world of glamour which is a universe away from the world in which Vicky Krieps is struggling valiantly to live and work. She is at war, an internal battle fought within the confines of her own mind and heart, to triumph over the siren call of that moneyed excess.
“I have to,” she said smiling. “I am too stubborn to turn back.”