Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival last year, Love Me Tender reframes intimacy through rupture rather than romance. Clémence, a lawyer, leaves her marriage in an attempt to step into a more truthful version of herself, a decision that quietly detonates the structure of her family life. What follows is not liberation in any cinematic sense, but a slow unravelling, as her ex-husband turns custody into a site of control, drawing their son Paul into a conflict he cannot fully understand.

The film resists dramatics, instead observing the erosion of a maternal bond with an almost clinical stillness. There are no villains in the traditional sense, only shifting allegiances and the subtle violence of influence. Clémence’s relationship with her son becomes increasingly fragile, shaped by absence, miscommunication, and the quiet manipulation that happens off-screen as much as on it. Emotion is never performed outright; it accumulates in silences, in withheld gestures, in the growing distance between bodies that once felt instinctively close.

What lingers is the film’s refusal to simplify its central question: what does it mean to choose yourself when that choice comes at the cost of being seen as a mother? Love Me Tender doesn’t offer resolution, only the uneasy suggestion that self-realisation and care are not always compatible. In its muted, observational style, the film turns tenderness into something unstable, no longer a given, but something that can be reshaped, withheld, or lost altogether.

Watch it in German theatres May 7th.