Filmmaker Anna Cazenave Cambet’s first approach to Constance Debré’s book Love Me Tender was as a reader. “I had no intention of adapting it at that time,” she explains. “It was a phenomenon in France that year [2020] and I had a very small baby and I was very moved by her story and it did me a lot of good because I then thought that the strong identity as a mother was going to erase my other identities and Constance’s testimony was the first I read that showed a woman willing to embrace them all as an artist, as a woman and beyond motherhood. The problem was that society punished her for doing so.”
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Debré, daughter of model Maylis Ybarnégaray and from a prominent family of French politicians, was 40 when she decided to leave her career as a criminal lawyer to become a writer and, moreover, came out. She had a son with her ex-husband and when she told him about her new life, he started a legal battle that ended up taking custody of the child from her, after a ordeal of psychological evaluations. That journey is what she tells in her book, Love Me Tender, without leaving out details about the women she slept with, sharing an apartment to pursue her dream, abandoning the bourgeois way of life… The film directed by Cazenave, which premiered in Cannes, will be released in Spanish cinemas on May 22.
“In cinema, actresses don’t age, we don’t show women over 30 with sexual desire, they become grandmothers or mothers without sexuality,” continues Cazenave sitting in a hotel in Paris, lucid and militant about the social position of women. “I had never seen a character like this on screen and I wanted to show it, she is free to have her own space and to live and give course to her desires, but she pays a high price just for being a woman and deciding to change her life and be the owner of it.”
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Vicky Krieps (The Invisible Thread) plays the role of the protagonist for which she shaved her head following the distinctive look of the now well-known writer. She “conveyed that toughness and fragility” that is read between the lines in Debré’s text, says the director, who has lived the filming experience as further proof that society is still far from the respect due to women. “I had to fight a lot to get it done, to show this woman as she was. They asked me things like: Will people like this woman? Will they empathize with her? Why show her having so many sexual relationships in the middle of the legal drama over custody of her son? As if men didn’t have sex during their divorce…” she recounts, still angry. “Working on this film made me realize how backward the view of women in France still is today,” she continues, “not least when presenting the film in Cannes, I went with my partner, who is the film’s director of photography, and they asked me where I had left my son, as if we could only be mothers all the time. And if something fundamental this film has taught me is that children are individuals and so are we. That is the strength of this character. But society benefits from making us believe eternally that we are part of the other, and that the other is part of us.”
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