Céline Sciamma’s understated coming-of-age drama follows the relationship between a mother and daughter. The film premiered in the main competition at the 71st Berlin International Film Festival.
After Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a historical drama about forbidden love that brought her a Best Screenplay award in Cannes in 2019, Sciamma presents a personal story set in her native city and based on her childhood memories of home. A young French woman, Marion, arrives at the house of her recently deceased mother with her daughter Nelly and husband, planning to empty her home and leave it forever. Overcome with melancholy and memories of her childhood, she does not notice her daughter, who is finding out about Marion’s past, traveling into it.
In trying to understand her mother, Nelly asks her about her childhood: her hopes, fears, and things that happened. She finds a clearing in the woods where Marion once built a fort and there encounters her mother as a child.
Shot over lockdown, Petite Maman is intimate in both its pace and its space, which perfectly fits the tiny protagonists. The fort in the woods is all the two girls require to enter the world of imagination and travel freely between the 1980s and the 2000s. The intimacy of the film is underscored by Claire Mathon’s cinematography—images shimmering between reality and fantasy in a subdued, opaque light.
The grammar of the film is minimal. Sciamma is not interested in creating a complex algorithm of time travel, and her magical realism feels like a natural and in fact barely noticeable feature of reality. She lovingly reconstructs the world of childhood where a game is as good a means of communication as any other and imaginary conversations and fantasies are indistinguishable from real time travel. Young Marion and Nelly are in fact adults, who do not need to simplify or run away from the world around them. When she returns to the present, Nelly is prepared to return to her mother her childish openness to the world.
The film will be screened in French with Russian subtitles.
Petite Maman
Director Céline Sciamma
France, 2021. 73 min. 6+