TIFF 2021: Petite Maman
TIFF 2021Celine Sciamma's new film, Petite Maman is a sweet and thoughtful exploration of the love and connection between a child and a parent. The angle at which Sciamma frames this story is resoundingly unique – almost a backwards compatible articulation of a parental bond. We’re accustomed to seeing films tell stories and celebrate the love that a parent has for her child. And even in stories which tell of a child’s love for her parent, the script’s perspective inevitably feels written by adults for adults. Sciamma’s exploration is a softer-spoken, child-centric piece that drills down into the moments of youth that form the architecture of a child’s belief structure, and where, perhaps, the nature of the child-parent connection crystallises.
Petite Maman captures big life events through the small lens of an eight-year-old protagonist shortly after the death of her grandmother, Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) and her parents’ stay a few days at the old family home to clean out her mom’s stuff. While Nelly plays in the woods, she befriends a neighbour girl named Marion (Gabrielle Sanz) and spends all her waking hours with her. What unfolds is curious and mysterious at first – if not even a bit befuddling. However, what’s ultimately happening is Sciamma’s narrative poetry and deep dive into how a child’s mind processes her family’s generations which preceded her. The friendship with the neighbor girl unfolds on screen much like a fantasy although without any otherworldly, fantastical elements. It’s merely an innocent girl’s imagination and sweet exploration of her own identity.
Sciamma coaches her young actresses effectively. These talented girls – twin sisters, too – constantly offer naturalistic beats, and they offer an authentic look at how a kid processes life and develops formative personality traits. Specifically, Petite Maman dives into Nelly’s need for connection. From the opening shot, we find her saying ‘goodbye’ to residents at her recently deceased grandmother’s seniors home. She does so, because she aches to have closure for even the smallest chapters of her life, and she’s particularly saddened that she didn’t have a special ‘goodbye’ with her grandmother. Later on, she pleads with her dad to allow her to stay at her friend’s house because she has come to understand when an ending is near and knows there will be no such chance to have a sleepover like this again. Be thankful for what you have and enjoy it. Nelly is coming to realise that life means dealing with finality, and this is her figuring out how to do so positively and attempt to understand it. To her credit, Sciamma never loses sight of the fact that Nelly is eight, and learning these lessons will be choppy and based in childlike processing. Meanwhile, via the friend Marion, we peek inside Nelly’s mother’s deep-rooted maternal instincts by way of the film’s central imagination fueled dynamic. We never fully know what kind of household or regular routine Nelly lives in, but we get to the kernel of each of Nelly’s and her mother’s need to process hurt feelings and their need to connect.
Petite Maman was a hurried little pandemic production. It has minimal locations – a house and the woods mostly – and a small cohort of a cast and crew. The two lead actresses come from the same household, after all. Sciamma does a great job drilling down into child psychology. Children are truly wonderful little humans, and Sciamma’s care and attention to the minutiae of that perspective – the type of play, mundanity, and interactions that fill an eight-year-old’s day – authentically tap into how a kid processes events to make sense of things like death and abandonment. The constraints of filming during Covid – smaller budgets, fewer crew, less mobility, etc. – meant this production was working far beneath the levels of her last production, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but it suits this small, intimate world perfectly fine. Many of us during the pandemic spent weeks and months reflecting on our lives and what makes us tick. Petite Maman does just that, and in a very special way. It doesn’t reach massive emotional heights or insights, but Nelly and her mom earn their connection. Between the tiny, away-from-the-world production and its commitment to self-discovery, this may be the best Covid movie seen to date, and there wasn’t even a virus.