Ella Rumpf gives this adoption drama its warmth and conviction. Alice Douard handles the difficulties of lesbian parenthood with care, although the writing sometimes presses for feelings the performance has already earned.
Alice Douard’s Love Letters is a good adoption drama that sometimes presses too hard for sympathy. Its strength is Ella Rumpf, who gives Céline’s wish to become a parent the weight of an ordinary, complicated desire. As writer and director, Alice Douard treats the legal difficulties facing a lesbian couple as pressures on people whose feelings deserve attention in their own right. There is warmth here, and enough confidence in the acting to make the occasional heavy-handedness of the script frustrating.
Ella Rumpf makes Céline’s vulnerability compelling without making her seem incapable of dealing with her own life. We were moved by Céline’s struggle to become a parent, because the performance makes the emotional difficulty of adoption felt alongside the legal obstacles. The actor’s compassion leaves room for the uncomfortable business of wanting something that cannot simply be made to happen. She keeps our attention on Céline as a person, even when the screenplay seems anxious to make sure we understand the importance of her predicament.
Monia Chokri plays Nadia, and the couple’s path towards parenthood gives Alice Douard a clear way into the strain involved in starting a family. The wish to have a child carries enough uncertainty before the difficulties of adoption are added. The writing is most persuasive when it allows those difficulties to complicate Céline’s feelings, giving her something more demanding to contend with than an obstacle to overcome. Her desire to become a parent remains understandable throughout, but the film makes space for the emotional effort involved in pursuing it.
Jacques Girault’s controlled cinematography suits that approach, keeping the images from competing with the performances for attention. Anne-Sophie Delseries’s production design is similarly discreet, leaving Céline and Nadia as the reason to look. Pierre Deschamps’s editing allows the emotional difficulties some room, though even at 97 minutes there are passages that could bear less emphasis. The use of music works well with the tenderness of the performances, helping the film express feelings that its dialogue sometimes makes too explicit.
That extra emphasis is the main limitation, and it comes from Alice Douard’s writing. When an emotion has already been made clear by Ella Rumpf, stating it more forcefully makes us impatient with the screenplay. We do not need Céline’s wish to become a parent made easier to understand; her difficulties and the performance have already done that work. The bluntness is especially noticeable because the photography is so controlled, and because the film has otherwise given us good reason to take Céline’s feelings seriously.
Among dramas about becoming a parent, Love Letters earns its place through the care it takes with the emotional difficulties of adoption. Parenthood is allowed to be demanding before it has even begun, and the film’s concern for Céline is easy to share. That makes it worth an evening, although anyone hoping for consistent restraint will have to forgive the screenplay’s occasional insistence. Choose it for Ella Rumpf, particularly if intimate family dramas are your habit.
