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Remembrance and Tenderness Grace Céline Sciamma’s Magical New Film


The first thing we see in Petite Maman is a young girl playing a game with an old lady. She has no reservations about it nor is she engaged out of obligation -in fact she seems to like the company. The differences between generations mean nothing to her. Her mother comes for her, it is time for them to leave; they are in a nursing home, and on their way out they stop to retrieve some things from an empty room. The girls’ own grandmother has just died, her mother’s mother, and it’s time for them to move on.
I was very excited to begin this years’ Toronto International Film Festival with a brand new movie from Céline Sciamma, her first to follow the sensational Portrait of a Lady on Fire in 2019. She is a filmmaker whose voice and whose subjects besides are incredibly fascinating though, drawn as she is to stories of adolescents, often marginalized, on the cusp of important self-discovery. After proving her mastery of an adult narrative with Portrait, Petite Maman is something of a return to her roots, comparably small in scale and inauspicious. An intimate story of loss and family, with a helping of magical realism to drive its’ virtues home.
The film is almost entirely set at the old house of the deceased grandmother and the woods surrounding it, that Nellie (Joséphine Sanz) spends a lot of time exploring while her mother is away for unexplained reasons. There she encounters a hut made of fallen tree branches exactly like the one her mother told her she built as a child, and also a girl Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), identical to her, who it doesn’t take long for her to realize is her own mother at her age.
One of the foundational ideas behind Back to the Future was Bob Gale musing on whether he would have been friends with his dad if they had gone to high school together: how would they relate, what would they have in common? Ultimately the conclusion that that movie pursued as far as this question was concerned was ‘no’ -Marty and George McFly couldn’t be more different, and would almost certainly have never crossed each others’ radius. Working off this same idea though Sciamma posits a very different relationship, making Petite Maman, the nicer inverse of Back to the Future. She contends that a mother and daughter at the same age and with similar experiences would forge an instant connection and become best friends. Nellie and Marion are inclined towards this of course, because at this point in their lives both are in need of a friend.
The house is very isolating and Nellie is away from everyone she knows. She’s just lost her grandmother and she has a very quiet, introverted personality. Marion is awaiting a major medical procedure, implied to be hereditarily linked to what grandma was afflicted with -she doesn’t have anyone either, apart from her mother (Margo Abascal), present for Marion in a way Nellie perhaps wishes her Marion was for her. That doesn’t affect her bond with the child-mother though, as the two build the hut and play board games and play-act scenes from a movie they’re writing, Marion aspiring to be an actress. There’s a great moment of contemplation at this revelation as Nellie realizes her mother never achieved her childhood dream, and it’s nicely poignant.
Indeed, Sciamma manages to draw a few such beautiful performances from these young twin actresses whilst allowing them to be perfectly naturalistic, and adorably so. Whole scenes are sometimes given over to them just being cute together. Obviously the Sanz girls get along very well, yet they also translate the particular chemistry of being on slightly different wavelengths. They are understated performances (Marion doesn’t react very dramatically when Nellie reveals the truth of their relationship), but it goes along with who these girls are, how they understand their reality, and the very calming nature of the piece. Sciamma of course has worked with child actors a lot, she has a way with them that perhaps rivals Spielberg, and it’s very evident here where they give her exactly what she needs.
Petite Maman is the story of a girl coming to understand her mother better, but not in any kind of clichéd sense. There’s no fish-out-of-water scenario, the worlds of the two girls aren’t terribly dissimilar and Nellie as established has a certain kinship with older generations -she’s right at home without smart phones or video games. It’s also interesting in that, for a story like this, Nellie and the modern Marion don’t have an estranged or troubled relationship -Marion has just been a bit psychologically absent lately. Before she disappears from the movie she does reflect openly to Nellie about growing up in this house, walking through the woods, building her hut, and being terrified by an imagined black panther at the foot of her bed at night. There’s even a really cute scene driving back from the nursing home where Nellie feeds her mother treats from the back seat of the car.
What the movie is more about is a sense of feeling, a particular mood –nostalgia mixed with mournful reflection. And it does evoke a strong transcending atmosphere that brings to mind visits to grandma’s house, perusing old photographs of your parents when they were young. It healthily confronts and assuages a fear of loss, Nellie dealing with her own through comforting Marion in her anxiety over the impending operation –and finding plenty of sweet distractions.
Sciamma never makes a definitive statement of what’s really going on. It could all be imaginary, a coping mechanism for Nellie, although she brings Marion home to meet her father (Stéphane Varupenne) which seemingly confirms her reality. Alternatively, it’s entertained that the young Marion is merely transfigured from the old one, the latter disappears just as the former arrives, as a way of Marion allowing Nellie a window into her childhood. It doesn’t really matter though, the film operates under the same nebulous child-like magic as My Neighbor Totoro, no doubt a particular influence on Sciamma, who similarly counteracts an abiding trepidation with carefree whimsy.
The result is something unabashedly sweet and innocent, a work of the utmost tenderness yet never aiming for sentimentality. Petite Maman feels personal in a way no Sciamma movie has since perhaps her debut Water Lilies –it is similarly low-key. Yet it also speaks to its’ themes of friendship, family, and loss as universally and as paramount as Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Even at her most subdued, Sciamma continues to amaze.

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