Céline Sciamma wrote Petite Maman as a challenge to both herself and audiences, to make a movie about relationships not driven by conflict. Even so, it opens in a quiet storm of emotions as eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) accompanies her parents to the countryside home of her recently deceased maternal grandmother to settle the woman’s affairs. Nelly, smart enough to grasp the situation but too young to fully feel the permanence of the loss, is mostly tranquil, but her mother, Marion (Nina Meurisse), can scarcely contain her grief and must soon return home to leave her husband (Stéphane Varupenne) and child to finish the task without her.
During breaks in packing up boxes, Nelly explores the surrounding forest. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma showed a confident grasp of steady pacing with her shots, and she extends that same patience to following Nelly’s traipse through the woods, capturing the child’s inquisitiveness without casting it as restless hyperactivity. The slow, gliding shots also create a vaguely dreamy atmosphere that builds until the girl stumbles across an empty house that looks suspiciously like her grandmother’s. Eventually, she meets a girl who looks suspiciously like herself, and who introduces herself as Marion (Sanz’s twin sister, Gabrielle).
It is exceedingly difficult to write children in a way that respects their often unrecognized intelligence and innate intuition without making them precocious mouthpieces of ill-fitting humor or philosophy, but Sciamma deftly illustrates how quickly Nelly both understands and emotionally accepts the impossible but undeniable situation: that she has somehow slipped through time and met her mother when Marion was her age. Nelly is also shrewd enough to share this revelation with Marion while keeping it from the younger version of her grandmother, knowing that the other child will accept what an adult would dismiss as a flight of fancy.
This understanding becomes the bedrock for the pair to talk about themselves and Marion’s as-yet unlived future in ways that bump up against the limits of their girls’ vocabulary and grasp of higher existential awareness while nonetheless revealing an openness that the film gently suggests is tragically lost as we age. Nelly confides in Marion about the melancholy that the latter develops as an adult and frets she might be the reason why her mom is sad. Marion, so cheerful to this point, suddenly grows quiet and ruminative as she disputes this, mumbling “You didn’t invent my sadness.”
It’s not all heavy, though. These are, in the end, still children, and they spend as much time playing with each other as reaching for life’s complex meanings. In one charming scene, the push their maturity too far when they stage an improvised play in which they veer into grown-up topics when one pretends to be the operator of a Coca-Cola factory overseeing laborers. It’s an almost parodically French interlude, comical but also illustrative of how both girls chafe to grow into their curiosity about the world.
Nelly’s adventures with the young Marion, lacking in dramatic urgency but instructive to children and adults alike, have already garnered copious comparisons to Hayao Miyazaki’s more sedate films like My Neighbor Totoro. And like Miyazaki’s work, what initially seems a straightforward fable about learning to grow up and enter the world becomes just as passionately a paean to remaining young and retaining the best aspects of childhood. Petite Maman suggests that the barriers of communication between parent and child might be knocked down if the former can remember what it is to be the latter, not simple and unformed but rather not yet bogged down with biases and doubt. This is a quiet but boldly stated notion, and it culminates in a coda somehow more tender and magical than the 70 minutes that preceded it.
Photo courtesy of NEON
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