Petite Maman – first-look review

If you could trav­el back in time and meet your moth­er as a child, what would you say to her? That’s the fan­tas­ti­cal, slight­ly eerie premise of Céline Sciamma’s fol­low-up to her rap­tur­ous­ly received 2019 film Por­trait of a Lady on Fire. On the sur­face of it, Petite Maman is a com­par­a­tive­ly low-stakes affair, but it is cap­ti­vat­ing and deeply affect­ing nonethe­less – a microscale mar­vel from a film­mak­er at the top of their game.

The film cen­tres on eight-year-old Nel­ly (Joséphine Sanz), whose grand­moth­er has just passed away. After leav­ing the nurs­ing home, she accom­pa­nies her moth­er (Nina Meurisse) and father (Stéphane Varu­penne) to the former’s child­hood home in the coun­try­side, where they spend the next few days sort­ing through the mem­o­ries and belong­ings left behind. Ear­ly on, Nel­ly express­es regret over the way she said good­bye to her grand­moth­er. Had she known it would be the last time they would see each oth­er, she says, she would have act­ed dif­fer­ent­ly. She may yet get a sec­ond chance.

When her moth­er leaves with­out notice, Nel­ly ven­tures into the near­by woods where she encoun­ters a famil­iar look­ing girl who’s busy build­ing a den around the base of a tree. The sim­i­lar­i­ty between them is imme­di­ate­ly strik­ing – indeed, not only are they the same age but Mar­i­on (Gabrielle Sanz) has the same name as Nelly’s moth­er, and lives in a house at the oth­er end of the woods that is iden­ti­cal to her grandmother’s, right down to the secret cup­board in the hallway.

With the adult per­form­ers very much on the periph­ery through­out, it’s left to the Sanz twins to car­ry the emo­tion­al weight of the sto­ry. To that end, the sis­ters are a rev­e­la­tion, dis­play­ing a lev­el of skill and matu­ri­ty that at once belies their ten­der age and new­com­er sta­tus. The scenes they share are a com­plete joy to behold, in par­tic­u­lar a recur­ring sequence in which they role­play a pro­ce­dur­al dra­ma they devise togeth­er about a count­ess mur­dered for her stake in the Coca-Cola fortune.

Though filmed towards the end of last year fol­low­ing the lift­ing of France’s lock­down restric­tions, Petite Maman was writ­ten while Sci­amma was still doing the press rounds for Por­trait of a Lady on Fire. So if the end prod­uct looks on paper to be ready-made for pan­dem­ic times – some­thing short and sweet, shot on a mod­est bud­get with a small cast and crew, and deal­ing with the death of a fam­i­ly mem­ber – in actu­al­i­ty it feels like it could have been made at any point (although cer­tain­ly not by any director).

There’s a time­less­ness to this charm­ing fable, with Sci­amma con­jur­ing clas­sic fairy tale imagery in the form of the enchant­ed wood­land set­ting, lit­tle Marion’s crim­son red fleece, and the sug­gest­ed pres­ence of a shad­owy beast lurk­ing in grandma’s house. Yet despite its semi-ambigu­ous, dream­like nar­ra­tive and hints of mag­i­cal real­ism, Petite Maman nev­er once under­mines Nelly’s per­spec­tive by infer­ring that her young imag­i­na­tion might have sim­ply run wild. In this regard, Sciamma’s film plays like live-action Stu­dio Ghi­b­li; When Marnie Was There made flesh.

This is a time trav­el movie, but not like any you’ve seen before, in that it’s less about the jour­ney and the mechan­ics of bridg­ing two dis­tinct points in time and more about the expe­ri­ence of shar­ing a fleet­ing moment with some­one you are intrin­si­cal­ly and inex­tri­ca­bly con­nect­ed to. It’s an under­stat­ed yet trans­portive film that beau­ti­ful­ly artic­u­lates the way chil­dren per­ceive and process loss and grief.