Proofs of love: a luminous work on love and filiation (critique)
The long and chaotic adoption journey of a couple of women told in a first film as sunny and generous as its irresistible performers: Ella Rumpf and Monia Chokri.
Both triumphed at the 2024 Césars. Ella Rumpf in revelation for Marguerite’s Theorem. Monia Chokri in a foreign film with Simple comme Sylvain. And Alice Drouard had the great idea of bringing them together as the headliners of her exciting first feature, discovered at the Cannes Critics’ Week. They play Céline and Nadia, a feminine couple who are awaiting the birth of their first child, whom Nadia is carrying. And the story, inspired by what the filmmaker went through, takes us into the intimacy of these two women and their daily lives turned upside down by this upcoming birth and the questions she asks Céline in search of legitimacy and a place. While she must embark on the bureaucratic twists and turns of an adoption request (requiring in particular to gather fifteen letters from her relatives attesting that she really wants this newborn and will be able to take care of him “well”) which will only reinforce these doubts. Proofs of Love evolves in a perfect balance between the concrete and the feelings of things, necessarily different for two women with such dissimilar personalities. Here we are at the antipodes of the banal film about the subject. Thanks to the quality of Alice Drouard’s writing but also to the complicity and incarnation of their characters by Ella Rumpf and Monia Chokri. There is a naturalness in their gestures of tenderness as in their moments of argument which gives flesh and soul to the subject. An energy, a generosity that makes the toughest moments poignant without ever forcing the point. Irresistible from start to finish.
By Alice Douard. With Ella Rumpf, Monia Chokri, Noémie Lvovsky… Duration 1h37. Released November 19, 2025
