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The pleasures and the pitfalls of a hybrid format are both in evidence in French actress-turned-director Romane Bohringer’s “Tell Her I Love Her,” a plaintive, affecting account of her struggle to come to terms with her mother’s abandonment, refracted through the similar experiences of politician, activist and author Clémentine Autain. With perhaps more ambition than rigor, her investigation leads Bohringer to layer meta-fiction onto auto-fiction onto docu-fiction, a scattershot approach that nonetheless gathers momentum and feeling as it goes. Finally, through otherwise potentially niche-interest personal histories, she accesses truths about mothers and daughters, memories and fallacies, that are far more universal. We cannot hope to fully understand a loved one whom we scarcely remember. But perhaps, through the act of remembering, we might better understand ourselves.

With a rather abrasive flurry of footage that creates a framing device out of TV reportage, home videos and an atypically precious voiceover,...