Love Letters (2025) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for every legal hoop the couple needs to jump through
Take a Drink: for scary-sounding penalties
Take a Drink: for baby belly
Do a Shot: for piano
Do a Shot: for the piano from Hell
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
A recent first-time watch of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (before watching its much milder remake) has put the slow (and shockingly recent) evolution of gay rights front of mind (current events certainly don’t hurt in that regard).
Love Letters takes us back to one of those landmark times. In 2014 France, gay marriage has been legal for a year, but not every law has caught up with that. One of a married couple is pregnant, but her wife finds she won’t immediately be recognized as their child’s parent. She will need to legally adopt it, and gather testimonies attesting to her fitness as a mother to be allowed to do so.
A Toast
This story is primarily a story of motherhood, yes, one about the pregnant literal mother to be (Monia Chokri) and the woman who will be another mother, and, as she says, father all rolled into one (Ella Rumpf), but also of the conflicted partner’s relationship with her own world-traveling pianist (i.e. absentee) mother of her own who’s a real pain in the ass (Noémie Lvovsky). This is a film full of frank (hehe) conversation. Their families love each other but sure as hell don’t know how to navigate what they still see as outside the norm.
While the many absurdities of the legal labyrinth these women and in particular Céline finds herself in do indeed inflame, it’s the universal doubts of parenthood that the film feels more interested in. Rumpf’s Céline is confronting whether she’s really ready to be a parent, even if it’s obvious to us she’s going to be a good one as she comforts her partner, or babysits kids that are clearly not the easiest to deal with. Lastly, the music is great.
Beer Two
As Cannes-selected dramas go, this story is a bit low on incident. It’s similar in a way to this year’s The Wedding Banquet– a story about gay life that feels preordained to a happy ending despite the very real and well-acted emotions that at times, very mildly, threaten to stand in the way of that.
In one way, it’s a necessary corrective to the “kill your gays” tropes that pervaded even the most well-intentioned LGBTQ stories for so long, but on the other, it’s… a little boring?
Verdict
Love Letters is a well-acted drama about a French lesbian couple navigating still-regressive laws and human doubts as they prepare to have a child.
