Àma Gloria – Gorgeous domestic drama on the… | Little White Lies

Àma Glo­ria – Gor­geous domes­tic dra­ma on the mean­ing of parenthood

12 Jun 2024 / Released: 14 Jun 2024

A person with curly hair and glasses appears to be in conversation with another person, with colourful lights in the background.
A person with curly hair and glasses appears to be in conversation with another person, with colourful lights in the background.
4

Anticipation.

Produced by Bénédicte Couvreur, a regular Céline Sciamma collaborator.

4

Enjoyment.

Lovely film grounded by beautiful central performances. This kid is a star!

4

In Retrospect.

Signals Marie Amachoukeli as a filmmaker to more than keep an eye on.

Marie Amachoukeli’s sec­ond film is a tri­umph of polit­i­cal and emo­tion­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty in its depic­tion of a young girl and her nanny.

It’s with remark­able sim­plic­i­ty and tact that Marie Ama­chouke­li crafts her debut fea­ture into a lay­ered med­i­ta­tion on mater­nal love and a child’s expe­ri­ence with grief. She lends the point of view of her film entire­ly to sixy ear-old Cléo (Louise Mau­roy-Pan­zani), a young, wide-eyed girl liv­ing in Paris with her wid­owed father (Arnaud Rebo­ti­ni), while being raised most­ly by her nan­ny, Glo­ria (Ilça Moreno Zego), in the absence of her late mother.

There’s a lot here about belong­ing too: about class; pow­er dynam­ics; and the colo­nial lin­ger­ings that con­tin­ue to seep into the mate­r­i­al real­i­ties of domes­tic labour and child­care – roles that women from the Glob­al South have to rely on to pro­vide for their fam­i­lies back home. Ama­chouke­li isn’t too con­cerned with devel­op­ing a stance towards these com­plex real­i­ties – after all, they lie well out­side the com­pre­hen­sion of our young pro­tag­o­nist, but she touch­es upon them with nuance nonethe­less. When tragedy strikes in Gloria’s native Cape Verde, she must urgent­ly return to care for the fam­i­ly she left behind. This news comes as a dev­as­tat­ing shock to Cléo, whose whole world revolves around her beloved guardian.

Yet her father is quick to assuage her sor­row by promis­ing that she can vis­it Glo­ria over the sum­mer hol­i­days. She embarks on the long jour­ney, but in Cape Verde, Cléo comes to realise that she is no longer at the cen­tre of Gloria’s atten­tion, that she has a life out­side of rais­ing her: a home; a fam­i­ly; a new grand­child on the way. Gloria’s own chil­dren, dis­mis­sive towards their moth­er whose pro­fes­sion meant that she was away dur­ing for­ma­tive years, are resent­ful of this young inter­lop­er, but slow­ly come to accept that it’s not Cléo who is at fault for their mother’s absence.

She is but anoth­er vic­tim of cir­cum­stance with­in a sys­tem that forces moth­ers away from their homes for sta­ble, reli­able incomes. It is aston­ish­ing how Ama­chouke­li draws out such a strik­ing­ly com­plex, emo­tion­al and com­mand­ing per­for­mance from the young Mau­roy-Pan­zani. We expe­ri­ence things through her shel­tered eyes, with a (some­times over-)reliance on tight frames and close-ups employed to lay bare how we see and feel our way through the world as small chil­dren: full of curios­i­ty, vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and naiveté, with no grasp of a big­ger picture”.

But it’s not all inno­cence, there are dark feel­ings in children’s com­plex lit­tle hearts too: jeal­ousy, pos­ses­sive­ness, spite – tricky emo­tions that sur­face as a means to grap­ple with the pain of real­is­ing you’re not at the cen­tre of someone’s uni­verse, even if they are to yours. Moreno Zego’s per­for­mance as the tit­u­lar Glo­ria is equal­ly lay­ered, and the rela­tion­ship between the two feels tru­ly gen­uine and lived-in.

Dream­like sequences of hand-paint­ed stop motion ani­ma­tion in watery tones peri­od­i­cal­ly punc­tu­ate the film, and the effect is quite beau­ti­ful. The mixed media tech­nique cuts through the film’s nat­u­ral­ism to bring forth some­thing felt and inef­fa­ble, akin to the rich, vivid worlds with­in children’s imag­i­na­tions, as well as the hazi­ness with which we recall child­hood memories.

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