Each year, Montréal’s largest French-language film festival, CINEMANIA, showcases a diverse range of films from the French-speaking world, including familiar classics and newly premiering titles. It runs until November 16 and features special events like masterclasses and guest speakers. For the festival’s 31st edition, I saw Queen Mom (Reine Mère), directed by Manele Libidi, and Love Me Tender by Anna Cazenave Cambet.
Queen Mom is a quick-paced dramedy that premiered in 2024 and takes place in France in the 1990s. It centres around the life of a young girl named Mouna (played by Rim Monfort) and her North African family as they face a difficult period of navigating and adapting to French culture.
Mouna is just a fifth-grader when she learns the story of Charles Martel. Much to Mouna’s despair, the voice from an “educational” show in her classroom says, “In the year 732, Charles Martel fought the Arabs in Poitiers.” At first, Martel comes to represent what Mouna’s most afraid of—not being accepted by her peers. Her family shares the same concerns. Her mother, Amel Bousseta (Camélia Jordana), moved from Tunisia with Mouna’s Algerian father, Amor (Sofiane Zermani), to France in search of a better life. The family experiences financial struggles, which quickly prompt Amel to question the move because she feels this isn’t the life her family deserves.
The two films were exemplary visions of resistance and acceptance. Queen Mom showed the joy in resisting stereotypes and fighting to change them. Love Me Tender was a more mature story of when resisting wasn’t enough, so you’re the one that has to change.
Mouna tries to run from fictional Charles (Damien Bonnard) until he tells her how he disapproves of the ways others portray him. “My horse never looked like that”, he says in reference to the painting Battle of Poitiers. She accepts him as her friend, someone who always takes her side against her mother’s pettiness and teaches her how to be tough against the rest of the world. Charles encourages her to fight back against the people who mock her and the educational system, which was not designed for her. At the same time, Amal and Amor push back against the unfairness of the bureaucratic housing system and the job market, using any energy they have left to fight each other.
The film embodies what it’s like to do everything right and receive nothing in return for those sacrifices. So all you can do is protest the sheer insanity of the situation you’re now stuck in. Amor starts singing Italian when a landlord questions his ethnicity, Mouna gives Charles a makeover, and Amal refuses to wear her cleaning lady’s uniform. The assertion of their own family narrative and history against the immigrant and Arab stereotypes they face makes their situation far less scary. Only when Mouna learns who Charles Martel really was, separate from her class’s anti-Arab narrative, can she say goodbye. The power her classmate’s prejudice had over her imagination goes away, too.
Love Me Tender (2025) is a story about a mother, Clémence Delcourt (Vicky Krieps), and her son, Paul (Viggo Ferreira-Redier), as she navigates her life with and without him. After raising him in a joint custody agreement with his dad, Laurent, he is suddenly taken from her. Sadly, his dad manipulates him to think the worst of her. In court, Laurent uses her sexuality and writing career as evidence that she is unfit to look after Paul.
The gorgeous, bright cinematography juxtaposes the time Clémence spends with her son in mediated family meetings and the moments she spends looking for women who will fill the rest of her time. The sharp differences make us feel like she’s two different people. A loving mother to her child and a creative person looking to share her experiences with the world through her writing. The movie jumps ahead in time and pauses on the moments with her son, because the time in between does not matter to her. When she can’t see him, any reminders of his existence, like the sight of other children, are painful. She has different partners throughout, but many of them don’t even have names; they are like passing memories. They fade away from her when they realize they’re being used.
The film embodies what it’s like to do everything right and receive nothing in return for those sacrifices.
The film is ultimately about grief—even if Clémence gets her son back, through the court or when he’s an adult, she has already lost so much time with him. His childhood and the relationship they could’ve continued to develop as he grew up were stolen from her. She faces immense grief throughout, mostly resisting it until she no longer has the strength to fight against her ex-husband and the family-court system’s wrongdoings. After years of trying, she accepts the loss of her child and lets him go. Not because she doesn’t love him anymore, but because she’s spent so long fighting for him with no avail that she went numb in the process. By acknowledging his loss, she opens herself up to feeling good things again.
The two films were exemplary visions of resistance and acceptance. Queen Mom showed the joy in resisting stereotypes and fighting to change them. Love Me Tender was a more mature story of when resisting wasn’t enough, so you’re the one that has to change.
