WORDS OF LOVE Review

After three days of Cannes, of competition films and docudramas and animated grief and Farhadi losing the thread, we walked into day four needing something that would simply, generously, let us feel something uncomplicated. Words of Love is that film. It is not trying to be Fatherland. It is not trying to be anything other than what it is: a warm, fluent, emotionally honest family drama about a girl who wants to know her father and a mother who does not know how to give her that. It succeeds at what it attempts. On day four of a long festival, that is enough and more.

The film opens with a scene of precise, quiet devastation. Seven-year-old Abigaelle and her mother Erika make the trip to the home of the father Abigaelle has never met. He looks out the window. He does not come to the door. The film does not linger on this moment for effect. It moves on, the way life does, the way a child does when the alternative is to stop moving entirely. On the way home they find a stray dog. They name him Vanilla. He is, as these things always are in French family cinema, immediately and completely lovable. We did not mind at all.

Rosenberg understands that the most interesting thing about a blended family is not the drama at its centre but the texture at its edges. The cousins at the party. The best friend's eye roll. The little brother's poo joke that nearly ends him.

What gives the film its particular warmth is Rosenberg's genuine affection for all of his characters, not just the central ones. The film is set in the Paris suburbs in the early 2000s, and it renders that world with a specificity and a nostalgia that feels lived-in rather than costumed. The social gatherings, the school friendships, the domestic negotiations of a household held together by a mother who is trying to be both enough and honest, all of it is handled with a fluidity and a humor that makes the harder emotional moments land without needing to announce themselves.

Hafsia Herzi, whom we also see this week in a Cannes Competition title, is extraordinary here in a completely different register. Erika is a mother who loves her daughter completely and cannot give her the one thing she most wants, and Herzi plays the tension between those two facts almost entirely in body language and expression, in the small involuntary adjustments of a person holding two contradictory truths at once. It is the kind of performance that the word subtle does not quite do justice to. It is simply true.

The film fast-forwards seven years and Abigaelle's tenacity has only deepened. Some children grow out of the longing for an absent parent. Others grow into it. Rosenberg knows which kind this girl is.

The device of the time jump, which could easily feel like a structural convenience, works here because Rosenberg has made us care enough about the younger Abigaelle that we want to follow her forward. Nour Salam takes over the role for the second half with an ease that makes the transition feel continuous rather than jarring. The film is also careful and honest about the collateral damage of Abigaelle's obsession, particularly on her brother Yoni, whose own complications are handled with a lightness that never trivializes them.

Words of Love will not win the Palme d'Or. It is not trying to. What it does, with 95 minutes of genuine craft and real human warmth, is remind us that the stories closest to the bone of ordinary experience are often the ones that need the least decoration. Happy endings, as the film quietly insists, come in all sorts of unexpected shapes. So do families. So do fathers, or the absence of them. We walked out of our first film of day four feeling lighter than we had in days. That is not nothing. At Cannes, after everything, that is quite a lot.

🍿 SCORE = 72/100