Mark Reviews Movies: PETITE MAMAN

Petite Maman, NEON

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 21, 2022

The conceit of writer/director Céline Sciamma's Petite Maman is so simple that it feels like a fairy tale. In a way, this short but considerate story, which revolves around a kind of fantastical or real time travel, is a fable. There's no clear, stated moral to this story, because it's entirely about the emotional connection of its mysterious premise. Here, to feel is to learn.

Our young protagonist feels deeply from the start, even if she's not entirely certain about the world, the people within it, and the specifics of life. She's 8-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), whom we first meet walking through the halls and stopping in the rooms of a nursing home. She helps one elderly woman with a word puzzle. She visits another and then another, simply offering a smile and a farewell. Nelly knows these women, and they know her. How much does this brief tour of these rooms, these bittersweet good-byes, and those happy faces say about the kind of person this girl already is?

Sciamma's storytelling and filmmaking are pointedly succinct. The whole of the film, including its shortened end credits, only runs a quaint 72 minutes, and whether that's by plan or simply the course of writing the extent of this particular story, the brevity of the film means that just about every moment possesses some greater meaning than what's actually happening. There are those farewells, which tell us of how selfless Nelly is with her time and open to people.

Then, there's a sweet scene that soon follows, in which Nelly's mother (Nina Meurisse) is driving herself and her daughter to their next stop. The girl announces that it's time for food, and after the girl chews on some snacks like a squirrel, Sciamma's camera moves to a near-close-up profile shot of the mother. Nelly's little hand reaches past the head rest, holding and offering her mom some of her snacks, before it reaches forward with a juice box. It's a notable reversal of this relationship, with the daughter serving as the mother's caretaker, and that's when both of the girl's arms extend toward her mother in enclose her in a soft, much-needed embrace. A little movie, perhaps, demands such little gestures.

Mom needs the hug, because her own mother, Nelly's beloved grandmother, has died. The girl, her mother, and her father (Stéphane Varupenne) were at the nursing home to collect and pack up the grandmother's possessions. They are heading to grandma's house, which was the mother's childhood home, to finish the packing and moving. Some other small gestures here say more about the girl—her need for independence in waking up after the drive to make the effort to walk to bed, her curiosity in wanting to sleep in mother's childhood bedroom, her need for some comfort in abandoning the bed to snuggle close to her mom, who's sleeping on the couch.

After telling Nelly about some of her childhood things, mom soon leaves the house for unknown reasons, and since dad is busy moving furniture and cleaning and putting more stuff in the moving van, Nelly decides to go to the nearby woods. There's a hut her mom made as a kid somewhere in there, and the daughter wants to find it. Sure enough, she discovers it, but Nelly also sees another girl, dragging a large tree branch to the makeshift structure.

The girl is named Marion, and if there's an eerie similarity between the two girl, that's partly because the other 8-year-old is played by Gabrielle Sanz, the other actor's twin sister. It's also because Marion is, somehow, Nelly's mother more than two decades in the past.

Sciamma doesn't hide, obscure, or even deflect from this fantastical, magical, or imaginary reality. Again, there simply isn't time for that, both on account of the filmmaker's intentional or accidental briefness and because of the unspoken rules of this story. The adult mother will return, or the father will finish the work. Nelly must leave this place, and the young Marion has an important surgery approaching—one that will prevent her from a disability like the one that has affected her own mother (played by Margot Abascal), who is, of course, the grandmother to whom Nelly regrets she didn't have a chance to say a proper farewell.

The resulting friendship, then, is briefly but deeply experienced, playful but filled with an inescapable sadness, and sweet but guided by the underlying notion that Nelly is learning about her mother at every step, with every word, and with every similar gesture. The two girls play games, both of the variety on a board and of a make-believe detective yarn. They make a joyful mess of eating and preparing food together.

They talk about Marion's mother, who seems to recognize Nelly in a quiet moment of shared affection (There's a similar moment between Marion and the man who will one day become her husband, but Sciamma wisely doesn't linger on it). The girls talk about the future, in terms of the music Nelly carries around on a portable player and of Marion admitting that she was already thinking about her future daughter before this inexplicable occurrence brought Nelly to her. They also talk about the past—Marion's present—that Nelly never heard from her mother all those decades later, when Nelly now fears that she might be the cause of her mom's bouts of melancholy.

Petite Maman does much in a short period of time. It gets right to the point and ensures that we feel that point in all of the film's small but poignant moments.

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