‘Words of Love’ Cannes Review: Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places
Abandoned by her father before she could know him, a girl spends her childhood chasing a man who has chosen, deliberately, not to be found. Un Certain Regard.
Abi has grown up without her father. That absence has calcified, over the years, into something close to obsession — a fixed idea, fiercely maintained, that her father must want to know her just as badly as she wants to know him. The film opens with her mother, Erica (Hafsia Herzi), taking young Abi to the apartment where the man supposedly lives. They are turned away at the door. Before leaving, Erica catches sight of him through a window, half-hidden behind the curtain. The image says everything: he is not hiding from strangers. He simply does not want to be found by them. What follows makes things still plainer — the man has another family, another life, and no apparent interest in the one he left behind.
Words of Love (Quelques mots d’amour) is a film about what that kind of wound does to a person over time — not in the dramatic, all-at-once way of crisis, but in the slower, quieter way of an absence that never quite stops aching. Abi has everything a child could reasonably need: a loving if exhausted mother, a cheerful younger brother, a warm extended family, a devoted best friend. None of it is enough. She can’t see any of it, because her gaze is fixed on what isn’t there.
Her mother tries reasoning with her, pleading with her, and finally simply enduring her. The more Erica pushes back, the more Abi pulls away, until the tension between them begins to fray something that might not be easily repaired. Even her friendship suffers. The only creature in the household who manages uncomplicated affection is a stray dog they take in off the street — everyone else moving through the apartment as though slightly stunned, unable to make full emotional contact.
Rudi Rosenberg made his debut with Le Nouveau (2015), a coming-of-age film that earned him recognition at San Sebastián. His follow-up comes a decade later, and it is a noticeably more subdued piece of work — less buoyant, more willing to sit with discomfort — though it shares its predecessor’s gift for working with child actors and non-professionals alike, drawing performances that feel genuinely lived-in rather than coached. The title’s «words of love» are precisely what Abi cannot access: not just from an absent father, but from a mother who has grown a protective shell around herself through years of single-handed effort, and whose sacrifices her daughter is too young and too consumed to recognize.
Midway through the film, the actress playing Abi changes — several years pass, and she becomes a teenager — but the search continues, and the situation grows messier and even more compromised as it does. There is something almost painful in watching her persist, because what the film sees so clearly, and what Abi cannot yet see at all, is that everything she is looking for is already around her.
But that’s the nature of this kind of longing: it cannot be argued away or reasoned out of existence. It has to be lived through. Words of Love understands this with a great deal of patience and grace, and builds its modest, quietly affecting story around that particular truth — the one that can only be discovered from the inside.
