Film review: Petite Maman weaves gentle magic around childhood and motherhood
In Céline Sciamma’s profoundly moving film, a little girl makes a new friend in a fairy-tale forest
Petite Maman is now screening at Fifth Avenue Cinemas
CELINE SCIAMMA’S exquisitely crafted Petite Maman is a small, gentle film that carries a massive emotional force.
The premise is simple yet profound: What if we could really come to understand and know our mother, to see them not as a parent, but as they were as a child?
Nelly’s (Joséphine Sanz) grandmother has died, and while her parents go about the grim task of cleaning out her house, Nelly explores the surrounding woods—fittingly, one that looks like a fairy-tale forest. There, she encounters a girl (Gabrielle Sanz) who is exactly her age, and bears a striking resemblance to her, hauling wood to build a little fort. They become fast friends, visiting each other’s humble houses through trails in the bush.
Sciamma (Tomboy and Portrait of a Woman on Fire) shows her real skill in constructing the entire world of the film from the tight point of view of an eight-year-old—albeit an incredibly bright and sensitive one. The writer-director weaves fantasy and magic into the plot with the naturalness of a child with an overactive imagination, and she withholds information so that we, like little Nelly, don’t quite understand all that is going on with the adults. Why does Nelly’s mother, Marion (the beautifully melancholic Nina Meurisse), suddenly leave the house without saying goodbye? Why does her mother’s sadness extend so far beyond the grief of losing her mother?
There’s something so refreshing about the children in French films—they’re never precocious. In the case of the Sanz sisters, they’re blissfully natural and capable of serious thought, saying as much in silent gesture and expression as they do in words. Watch Nelly try to comfort her mother from the back seat of a car, feeding her Cheezies and sips from her juice box; or witness her eyes as she processes the fact that her new friend is about to undergo an unspecified operation. Petite Maman works real magic without ever being sentimental, patronizing, or cute.
Sciamma doesn’t offer clear explanations for all the mysteries here, but gets at deeper, amorphous territory about love. She explores what it means to be a parent—an “adult”; how we’re inextricably shaped by some of our earliest experiences; and the seismic effect of losing the person who has the most impact on our life. Petite Maman is also a little bit about loneliness, or perhaps about the experience of being an only child: “Secrets aren’t always things we try to hide,” Nelly says. “There’s just no one to tell them to.” Watching Petite Maman, you’ll feel like Sciamma has let you in on some of life's most wonderful secrets. Even if it wrecks you.
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