Say you love me

Mélina (Karin Viard) is one of France's most famous voices, but no one knows her face. The popular radio presenter has so far managed perfectly to stay out of the hype about her person and enjoys the anonymity. Because the 40-year-old woman has a hard time dealing with other people. Only the search for her mother, who abandoned her when she was a toddler, keeps driving Mélina out of her self-imposed interpersonal isolation. Now it seems she's finally received the clue she's been waiting for for years: her mother's name is Joelle (Nadia Baretin) and she lives with her family in a small suburb not far from her luxury neighborhood. Although she can't bring herself to confront Joelle directly, she is drawn into the middle of her mother's turbulent life by chance. But whether she will get the answers here to all the questions that have plagued her since childhood seems doubtful.

Say you love me is a French drama that has some wonderful moments to offer, especially at the beginning. Karin Viard's portrait of a woman who is always striving for perfection, but is so incredibly broken herself on the inside that she is barely capable of genuine interpersonal relationships, is simply magnificent. She always hits the right spot between comedy and drama, so that the whole thing never comes across as silly, but also not too melancholic to stifle the lightness of the humor. However, this mixture can't be transferred to the entire screenplay, which is why many moments of the film somehow seem very ponderous or even inconsequential.

Surely, even if the film is primarily a rather restrained comedy and the dramatic moments don't really take over even in the last third, the film lacks that certain something to still give the occasionally quite charming ideas the necessary warmth that would have ultimately given the film a more lasting effect. There are isolated moments that stand out, that are particularly funny or particularly touching. But as a whole, Say You Love Me just doesn't leave an impression. And that's a real shame given the strong acting of Karin Viard and Nadia Baretin.

Whoever likes small, unspectacular arthouse comedies from France, whoever likes humorous as well as dramatic mother-daughter stories and doesn't mind the somewhat ponderous staging, will certainly discover the undoubted qualities of this film. But despite the many positive aspects, in the end the impression remains that the potential of the story, which was well built up especially at the beginning, wasn't really exhausted and that the lasting sense of well-being promised again and again by successful moments doesn't want to set in. So the whole thing is nice, but unfortunately nothing more. Therefore applies then also: only with restrictions worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp