She’s a pill-popping dipsomaniac. She’s a fraudster and shoplifter who ropes in her daughter as her partner in crime. She’s a lush who disappears into the night to seduce random men while pining for the love of her life to be released from jail. She’s a train wreck snowballing into an avalanche.

She doesn’t quite sound like the lovable type, does she?

Yet actor Suzanne Clément did grow to love her.

In fact, Clément repeats the word love numerous times while talking about her role as the self-destructive, delusional Marlene in the film Sitting on the Edge of Marlene, which opens on Friday (February 27).

Of course, the film itself is all about love. Not necessarily romantic love, which is the unattainable carrot in the dark dramedy. Rather, it’s about bonds so inexplicably strong they defy dysfunction.

B.C. director Ana Valine’s debut feature, based on a Billie Living­ston novella, depicts the crumbling world of 16-year-old Sammie (Paloma Kwiatkowski), whose unemployed mother, Marlene (Clément), is so blinded by her romantic fantasies that she doesn’t register how much of a liability she is to both herself and her daughter.

In contrast to Clément’s portrayal of Kyla, an inhibited, quiet, stuttering neighbour in Xavier Dolan’s much-lauded Mommy, Marlene teeters on the opposite end of the personality spectrum: reckless, histrionic, outrageous. Although the veteran Québécois actor has racked up numerous film credits and awards—including a best-actress award at Cannes for her portrayal of a cisgender woman in love with a man who transitions into a woman in Dolan’s Laurence Anyways—this plum role intimidated her.

“I was…scared of how I was going to portray her,” she says by Skype from Paris, where she’s shooting the Belgian film Les Premiers, les Derniers. “And once the shooting started, it took a couple of days and then suddenly I was into her.…I wish I could do her again because I think I needed to be in her to really kind of understand her better.”

Marlene, Clément opines, is not the type of person you understand with your head. Her complexity, built from layers of experience, has to be felt.

“It’s someone you live with,” she says. “Because a lot of times she’s in states of being that are extreme. She’s not in her own mind a lot of times, so it’s not like something that she plans.”

In fact, Marlene’s impact extended beyond the characters in the story. Clément, who marked her first major English-language role and her first shoot in Vancouver with this film, said it was “such an intense shoot” that she was thoroughly drained when the production wrapped. “It took a while to get her out of my body, out of me,” she adds.

In spite of all that, Clément still emphasizes how much she loved (there’s that word again) tackling the character. That includes Marlene’s perilous downslide.

“There’s something of despair in that, but there’s also an abandonment—you abandon yourself to that,” she says. “There’s something also powerful in the destruction, and appealing, actually. It’s falling. Falling has its appeal.…It’s a path which I wouldn’t take as a human being, as me, as myself. But in a character, when you’re allowed to go there, even if it’s fake, there’s something thrilling about it.”

Needless to say, love has a logic all its own.