“Petite Maman” - Film Review
My first Céline Sciamma film was Water Lilies, which I watched in my parents’ basement. I think I must’ve stumbled on it accidentally as I was scrolling through whatever extra channel my parents got when they bought cable. It must’ve been a weekend afternoon when everyone else was out because I remember watching it alone. It was my first foreign film, and like nothing I’d ever seen before.
Since then, I’ve anxiously awaited all of Sciamma’s movies. There’s something so deeply personal and careful in them. Her most famous, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, is a true marvel, and one of the industry’s best explorations of love, art, and what it means to be a muse. It’s a grand movie. Perhaps it’s the distance covered or the time elapsed, but there’s something so very large about it. Maybe it’ seeing the emotions of a years-long love affair unfold before us. Sciamma’s movies are odes to our humanity and the emotions that overwhelm us. It’s very easy to make sweeping films about the end of the world or the next alien invasion, but it takes a special kind of person to make a movie about the immensity of the human condition.
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Despite what the name implies, Petite Maman feels just as grand. The story focuses on Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), an eight-year-old who has just lost her grandmother (Margot Abascal). Nelly is our entry point to the story, so we don’t always know what’s going on around her. Her grandmother seems to have passed due to a condition she’s had for most of her life, but it’s not something Nelly has a name for. Along with her mother (Nina Meurisse) and father (Stéphane Varupenne), Nelly goes to her grandmother’s home to pack up what remains of her belongings. They all spend one night in the house, but then Nelly’s mother leaves suddenly while Nelly and her father remain to finish the job. Why Nelly’s mother leaves is never fully explained, but Nelly can tell that her mother has been sad for a long time and that her leaving has something to do with that.
Nelly has been told many stories about the treehouse her mother had somewhere in the woods nearby, and she sets out to find it. While in the woods, Nelly meets a young girl named Marion (Gabrielle Sanz) who is building a treehouse. The two become fast friends, and after Nelly visits Marion’s home, she becomes convinced that Marion is her mother as a child.
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Throughout the course of the movie, I was reminded of Annette Benning’s line from 20th Century Women. “You get to see him out in the world as a person. I never will.” She’s talking about her son and how she’s jealous of his friends getting to know him as more than just her son. Petite Maman focuses on that same sentiment from the child’s perspective.
As a kid, it’s very hard to picture your parents as having once been your age. It feels as though they’ve always been parents and couldn’t possibly have had the same childlike hopes and fears you’re currently going through. There’s a disconnect between parents and children when the child can’t see the wonder in their parents’ eyes anymore. In the same way parents can’t see their kids as wholly formed people out in the world, kids can’t see their parents as wholly formed people who had a life before they existed.
What’s so magical about Petite Maman is that it allows Nelly to see her mother as an equal. She’s not her mother, she’s Marion, a goofy child she gets to go on adventures with. They create a movie together, share secrets, and build the treehouse her mother remembers so fondly. Together, they’ve made something on their own. They share giggles while trying to flip a pancake and take a rowboat for a trip down a river. Childhood friendships have a certain type of intimacy, a fierceness that is specific to those relationships. They’re the friends whose phone numbers we still have memorized, the houses that felt like second homes, the sleepovers where no sleeping ever happened. These are things that shape all of our relationships going forward.
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There’s not much in terms of plot in this film. By all accounts, it’s just about three days in a small girl’s life. What Sciamma excels at in all of her movies is quietness. She allows her characters to live and breathe, with the smallest gestures filling in the details of their relationships. In one of the first scenes, Nelly asks her mother if it’s snack time and her mother says yes. After Nelly has eaten for a few moments, she leans forward from the backseat of the car to give her mother some food and a drink from her juice box. All of this is done without saying a word. Nelly knows when to give her mother another bite and when it’s time for a drink. Her mother knows how Nelly likes her breakfast every morning. What’s at stake in this movie is love and relationships, the simple beauty of knowing someone and having to say “goodbye” and “I’m sorry” to that person.
After spending the better part of a year isolated from family, Petite Maman feels like a love letter to the people we care about. The things we share with them when we’re scared or when we’re happy. The things we pass on to them, good or bad. Stories that span generations and the power they hold, the remembrance and celebration of giving a child the name of someone you love. As Marion says to Nelly, “secrets aren’t always things we try to hide. There’s just no one to tell them to.” The pandemic may have kept us from the people we share our secrets with, but it has also taught us that there are some bonds that cannot be broken, try as the world might.
The 72-minute runtime is misleading. Somehow there’s so much said in that brief window than in movies with triple its runtime. This slow-moving ode to childhood friendships and parental relationships is not for everyone, but for those who connect with it, it’s something special. In a word, Petite Maman is tender.
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