Clocking in at around 70 minutes, this follow up from Celine Sciamma, the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, was my most eagerly anticipated film of TIFF. Petite Maman explores family relationships, grief, and other emotional arcs through a more playful lens of a child.
That child is Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), whose grandmother has just died. Nelly is helping her mother, Marion (Nina Meurisse) and father (Stéphane Varupenne) clear out her grandmother’s house so it can be sold. While staying at the house, she encounters a young girl, who through fate or magic or pure imagination turns out to be a child version of her own mother, Marion (Gabrielle Sanz). Each time she meets up with the child Marion she is transported back to her mother’s childhood home, even having a second chance to see her recently deceased grandmother again in a younger stage of her life.
Nelly and the child version of Marion spend several days getting to know each other as friends instead of family, making crepes, building forts, and sharing secrets. Although the “meet a younger version of your parents” gimmick has been done before, it’s interesting to see it executed with protagonists of such a young age. Both characters are so young that they lack the vocabulary to use the opportunity to speak on philosophical terms or the meaning of their time travelling connection.
In one of the movie’s most moving scenes, for example, Nelly and Marion casually discuss whether Marion actually wanted to have Nelly at the young age that she did. Unable to account for all the complexities of that question – the trajectory of her life, the financial or emotional difficulty of having a child at a young age – Nelly says she thinks Marion wanted her. Marion simply responds that she’s not surprised, because she’s already thinking so much of her new friend. It’s an honest and simple distillation that still manages to pack an emotional punch.
That unique lens of the protagonists’ age leaves the compact film heaping to the brim with feelings of nostalgia and comfort. Sciamma’s strengths are in the small details and creating an overall mood through those details – the clothes the children wear, the games they play, the objects they carry. The combination of which forms a film full of nostalgia and comfort.
The young age of the protagonists may also stop the film from delivering as much heft as viewers are expecting from the outing, however. That 70-minute runtime cuts both ways, making the film seem to perhaps breeze over some of the details and moments that could have lingered longer or been more moving. I think this film will be more emotional for the personal details the viewer brings to it; for anyone who has recently lost their mother, for example, I think this film will be filled with emotional landmines.
Petite Maman doesn’t quite live up to the great heights of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but it’s a playful and touching look at a relationship between mothers and daughters, imbued with the lived-in, comforting, signature vibes that Sciamma does so well.