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Early on in “Snapshots,” an elderly matriarch announces to her visiting daughter and granddaughter that two topics of conversation are forbidden for the weekend: “what-ifs and politics.” It’s as sure a sign as any that those themes — identity politics in particular, with the red-blue kind more implied — will proceed to dominate Melanie Mayron’s earnest, gentle-hearted film, an across-the-generations ode to following your heart and living your truth. If that sounds corny, this reflection on an illicit affair between two young married women, and the familial reverberations it has decades later, isn’t shy of stating its case in bluntly homespun terms: One rather wishes Jan Miller Corran and Katherine Cortez’s evidently heartfelt script placed a little more trust in its actors (and audience) to connect the emotional dots.

As it is, “Snapshots” wallows a little too readily in cliché to be quite as stirring as its story...