With Petite Maman, Celine Sciamma addresses cyclic nature of motherhood and loss through sisterhood-Entertainment News , Firstpost

In an interview, French director Céline Sciamma revealed that her starting point for Petite Maman was an image she found difficult to get out of her head: two eight-year-olds — a mother and a daughter — eating cereal at the dinner table. 

Really, it is a mic-drop of a premise, one that could head into different genres — a science-fiction thriller, a time-loop drama, a sadcom, or even a ghost story. But each of these directions essentially demand that the film keep its central conceit a complete secret from the viewer, unleashing the identities of the two girls as a “twist” probably at the halfway mark. 

It is not entirely surprising then that Sciamma chooses to eschew all of these approaches in Petite Maman, a spellbinding masterpiece in its own right. As the filmmaker’s previous work — capturing the textures of teen adolescence in Girlhood and Water Lilies; the alienation of a 10-year-old in Tomboy; the sensuous counter of a relationship between an artist and muse in Portrait of a Lady On Fire — it is evident she is more invested in unlocking undiscovered facets of human behaviour than in technological exposition and gimmickry. 

Sciamma employs a naturalistic perspective to the proceedings that lends Petite Maman an affecting fairytale-like quality of magic realism. It is childlike in its handling of time, asking the viewer to play along instead of being distracted by the need to solve a puzzle. And like most of her work, Petite Maman concerns itself with the filmmaker’s trademark themes: how the human mind processes — and hides — grief, loss, pain, and alienation.

At just 75 minutes, the film is Sciamma’s crispest outing and one of her most affecting. It is probably why she makes no secret of the conceit in Petite Maman — the fact that the two little girls developing a friendship are mother and daughter is revealed to the viewer in under 20 minutes. In fact, we know it before the characters in the film do. The adults in the film do not even get to find out.

The film opens with a death and the cloud of lingering sadness never quite leaves the movie. At a nursing home, eight-year-old Nelly [Joséphine Sanz] gently says goodbye to the old residents of a senior care facility as her 31-year-old mother [Nina Meurise] packs up the room of Nelly’s grandmother, who has just passed away. Her mother, lifeless and grief-stricken, can barely get through the motions of erasing all traces of her dead mother. Nelly, on the other hand, decides to keep her grandmother’s walking stick so that she never forgets her. They load up the remaining belongings in their car, and drive all the way to Nelly’s grandmother’s home to begin another round of memory cleanse.

Nelly, an intuitive child, recognises her mother’s pain, and develops a maternal instinct toward her. Working with her Portrait of a Lady on Fire cinematographer Claire Mathon, Sciamma frames a wonderfully tender sequence to articulate this role-reversal: We see Nelly open a packet of snacks in the back seat; we see her adorably munching. And then the camera moves to the front seat, where we see just her hand reaching out near her mother’s face to feed her chips while she is driving. After the third round of mouthfuls, her hands place a juice box in front of her mother with the straw adjusted towards her mouth to help with sipping it. Her mother dutifully drinks the juice, just as she ate the snacks, a small smile stretching across her face. No words are exchanged in this scene but this act of care marks the beginning of Nelly’s single-minded attentiveness to listen to her mother even when she is not speaking.

Nelly’s grandmother’s home is nestled deep in the woods of countryside France, and once they reach, her mother retreats even deeper into herself before completely falling apart. She barely registers Nelly’s innocent queries probing the loneliness of her childhood or lets her in. Mother and daughter meet only at bedtime when she comes to her childhood room to tuck her daughter in. Sensing an opportunity, Nelly asks a lot of questions. Her mother deflects them, until she cannot anymore. She tells Nelly about long-lasting childhood scares, listens to her daughter grieve about not being able to say a final goodbye to her grandmother, and promises to take her to see a treehouse that she had built long ago. 

But when Nelly wakes up the next day, her mother is gone. Her father, who was until then at a remove from the mother-daughter duo, offers some inadequate explanation for her absence. If Nelly feels abandoned, she does not show it, although her loneliness is underlined when her father gives her a game “for one” to play in the woods. Then, as Nelly is searching for her mother’s treehouse out in the woods, she spots a girl, about her age, at a distance. Dressed in a sweater, the girl is slowly dragging a thin branch with all her might; when she spots Nelly, she lets the branch go and waves at her for help. Nelly runs to her aid, and the two girls collect autumnal leftovers to construct the treehouse. The girl’s name is Marion [played by Gabrielle Sanz, Joséphine’s real-life twin], the same as Nelly’s mother. 

When a bout of rain interrupts their activity, Marion runs to her home and Nelly follows behind. Once inside, the duo wordlessly remove their sweaters and dry themselves off in a choreographed synchrony, as if they have been close their entire lives. They head to the dining table where Marion serves them both a bowl of cereal. It is here that we learn that Nelly shares the same name as Marion’s grandmother. 

There are other things that feel familiar too, not just to Nelly, but also to the viewer: The house that Marion lives in exactly resembles the house that Nelly’s mother’s home. She was at this very dining table in the morning sitting right across from her father. As if to confirm the theory, Nelly makes an excuse to go to the bathroom but instead peers inside the room of her dead grandmother. She sees a woman lying in the room with her back turned toward her, and we spot a familiar walking stick right next to her bed. The lines between the past and the present have never been this clear. At that moment, Nelly is sure that Marion does not just share her mother’s name; she is her mother. In seeing Marion as a little girl plagued with a similar feeling of detachment from her own mother, Nelly is offered the opportunity to confront her mother’s past in order to reconcile with the idea of a present without her.

For the remainder of the film, they are practically inseparable, making pancakes together, bringing in birthdays, writing screenplays, and acting out their own fantasy portrait of the ideal family. Sciamma zooms into their bond with a remarkable clarity, employing their innocence to deliver deep truths about coping with the loss of a loved one, and the ways mothers pass on their loneliness to their daughters, opening up deep wounds and putting a band-aid over it, one that had until a few minutes and lifetimes ago, seemed out of reach.

In many ways, every Sciamma outing is invariably fixated with the nature of time. Her stories often unfold over brief periods of time that feel like they condense the ebbs and flows of an entire lifetime. In a Sciamma universe, time always seems to be running out or marching on. This tussle is most evident in Petite Maman — Sciamma unlocks that “perfect moment” in a relationship in which two people want to both cling on to each other, and to the small amount of time they have between them forever. “There isn’t gonna be another time,” Nelly tells her father when she pleads with him to let her spend one extra night with Marion. 

Indeed, the threat of goodbyes always lurks around the corner but the cyclical nature of the film’s time-loop entails that every ending leads to a beginning. Mothers behave exactly like their daughters, and daughters turn into their mothers before they can even recognise it. In this blissful rendition, Nelly sees Marion as a lonely girl, and hears the things that her mother left unsaid for the first time, understanding her through the ghosts of her childhood. In her, Marion sees her past and future, and realises that children do not always have to be adults to know how to say the right things. They need each other to comfort themselves and their invented sadness. 

The question of buying into this universe [the only clue that Sciamma offers is the fact that Nelly is not making the whole thing up in her head] then seems redundant given that the idea of sisterhood spans generations and timelines. It is perhaps why unlike other time-loop movies, Petite Maman does not feel like an exercise in wishfulness but instead, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see your loved ones as the people they are too tired to be any longer.

The two electrically charged climactic moments of Petite Maman, bookended by a beautiful score, beautifully drive this message forward. Both embody the idea of a perfect moment with someone you love but they are so different in tone — playful as opposed to emotionally heartrending — that it acts as the perfect reminder of an essential truth. Very few filmmakers can move you like Céline Sciamma, whether the lady in the portrait is on fire or building treehouses.

Petite Maman is streaming on MUBI.

Poulomi Das is a film and culture writer, critic, and programmer. Follow more of her writing on Twitter.

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