Tell Him I Love Him: Penalty Surfaces (Critical)

Romane Bohringer uses Clémentine Autain’s book to tell the story of their complex relationships with their mothers by brilliantly mixing documentary and autofiction(s).

There is something intriguing about seeing a personality as discreet as Romane Bohringer open the doors of her privacy wide as soon as she goes behind the camera. In the irresistible Blurred Loveshe recounted her separation from Philippe Rebbot. And here, the one who we know has strong ties with her father Richard, reveals her relationship with her mother Maggy. The missing piece of all the portraits dedicated to her because she abandoned her at 9 months. But the gesture of autofiction is less direct here. He goes through his discovery of the magnificent Tell him I love him by Clémentine Autain, story of her no less tortuous relationship with her own mother, the actress Dominique Laffin, who died in 1985 when she was only 12 years old.

Romane Bohringer therefore adapts here this book in which she recognized herself while intertwining her own journey. The bias is shocking, the accusation of wanting to use someone else’s story as a springboard inevitably looms large. Except that the film is precisely the opposite. A true work of four voices – two daughters and two mothers – including the mixture of genres that constitutes it (archive images, fictionalized scenes, off-screen readings, moving confidences from Richard Bohringer in a park, an extract from Cinderella by Joël Pommerat…) tells the chaotic path, rich in back and forth between present and past undertaken by the director to repair this damaged link with her mother, as Clémentine Autain did, through the prism of writing, with hers. For a result that is as fun as it is overwhelming.

By Romane Bohringer. With Romane Bohringer, Clémentine Autain, Eva Yelmani… Duration: 1h32. Released December 3, 2025