After her previous film, Portrait of a Young Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, 2019), was met with towering success, Céline Sciamma entered the rank of those filmmakers whose new films are hotly anticipated. The pandemic, however, has forced many much-awaited projects to be put on hold, or, at the very least, prompted their creators to rethink their scripts – as is the case of Radu Jude’s new film – but, at the same time, it also proved to be a challenge which prompted directors who still wanted to practice their craft in spite of the period’s difficulties to think of new kinds of projects. The latter case is that of Petite Maman – even though Sciamma started working on its script during the international tour of her previous feature, the filmmaker resurrected the project after the lockdown in France was over, and the result is an intimate and touching drama, which, in spite of its relatively short runtime (72 minutes), manages to reach the furthest inner depths of its characters.

Petite Maman follows a couple of days in the life of Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), an eight-year-old girl, whose maternal grandmother has recently passed away. She spends a couple of days in the countryside with her parents, who arrive to pick up the grandmother’s belongings from her elderly asylum room and to tidy up the forest-side house which her mother, Marion (Nina Meurisse), grew up in, spending time playing around the house which is gradually being emptied, while also observing her parent’s grieving process. Emotionally overwhelmed, her mother goes back home after two nights, and Nelly stays behind with her father – but, one day, as she is playing in the forest, she happens upon Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), a girl that is her age, to whom she bears a striking resemblance to. Slowly but surely, it becomes increasingly clear that the girl in the forest is her very own mother, from the past – and from this point onward, the film plays along the fine line between imagination and magical realism. Did Nelly discover a time portal? Is Marion a figment of her imagination? Or is there a point in the forest where the space-time continuum folds upon itself? Habitually using tracking shots which are centered on Nelly’s figure, soaked in saturated colors and set in a house whose decor brings to mind the seventies while still retaining a timeless feel (since no clear time coordinates are given, not even when it comes to costumes), the film is constructed from the little girl’s perspective, as the camera oftentimes records events from the height of her gaze. This sensation of detachment from time is also enhanced by the small cast, as there are rare cases in which more than two characters appear on-screen, giving the feeling of a story that could take place anytime in the last 50 years.

This isn’t the first time Sciamma pens a narration about children and their friendships – she is also the author of the script behind the wonderful 2016 animation, My Life as a Zucchini (Ma vie de Courgette), which is set in an orphanage and follows both the relationships that are forged between the kids, while also tracing a map of the traumas which they are facing, in a discourse that banks in on the playfulness, small pranks and games of the children. Both films start out from somber premises – that of children that are facing the loss of family, but Sciamma knows how to perfectly balance out the fragile equilibrium between the first strands of maturity and the vital curiosity of her protagonists, which is amplified by the fact that the adults surrounding them are overwhelmingly kind: in one of the film’s most particularly touching scenes, Nelly regrets that she hasn’t “properly” said goodbye to her grandma, only to realize that there is no way to really know that you’re seeing someone for the last time. At the same time, Nelly is fundamentally a child: she wants to spend as much time as she can with Marion not only due to the fascinating opportunity to directly observe her mother as she was at her own age (and whom of us hasn’t imagined our parents’ childhoods?), but also because she wants to play around and have a friend, all the more so that, once her cosmic happening comes to light, they also become mutually fascinated by each other’s eras. (“Is this the music of the future?”, asks Marion, while listening to a song played by Nelly on her headphones.) The Sanz twins’ marvelous performances, set apart only by the curliness of their hair, gives the film its much-needed sense of ingenuity, the lack of which would have spelled its failure – and the two young actresses are a riveting discovery.

Just as Sciamma notes in the film’s press dossier, the film’s premise is all the stronger now, in light of the pandemic’s tragedies, whose victims were overwhelmingly the elderly – even more so that, in the film’s first shot, Nelly is followed around as she is giving her goodbyes to the rest of the ladies that are living in the elderly asylum. (It’s also significant that, in spite of the interior scenes being shot on a film set, the filmmaker set out to recreate her own grandmother’s apartment, and the exteriors were shot in her hometown.) But Petite Maman is also a film about womanhood, which can be seen as a continuation of the director’s previous explorations of the topic (the film’s sole male character, the father, is a portrait of tenderness): not inasmuch a film about motherhood as it is a film about daughterhood, about female friendships and daughter-mother relations. Bending the conventions of genre films (such as time travel movies and buddy movies), the film will probably, like Courgette before it, be adored by both young and adult audiences since it allows for readings coming in from both sides of the age spectrum.

Although it’s a risky observation – I must say that I enjoyed Petite Maman much more than Portrait de la jeune fille en feu. The latter is undebatably a modern classic of queer cinema, but oftentimes it feels like its dialogues (and Sciamma is the kind of screenwriter who knows how to create deep lines out of few words) are a tad bit forced, just as forced, excessively melodramatic or programmatic some situations in its latter half might seem. Here, instead, the film’s great reveal comes across as natural, and the lines simply flow, in spite of a tone that might be perceived as sententious in other circumstances. In contrast with Sciamma’s previous film, this time around it doesn’t seem that she is coming to the set with a list of goals to achieve – but who, just as her characters, is giving in to her own curiosity and need to explore even the tiniest of details with a fresh eye. A small, yet very powerful film.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.