ÇÉline Sciamma’s beautiful fairy tale reverie is brought about by the double mysteries of memory and the future: simple, elegant and very moving. I instantly fell under his spell and found myself thinking of classic English tales like Tom’s Midnight Garden, by Philippa Pearce, or The Child in Time, by Ian McEwan. And there is extra-textual pleasure in asking yourself exactly what your child stars thought about it during filming – and what they think about it now.
Joséphine Sanz plays Nelly, Marion’s 8-year-old daughter (Nina Meurisse). The latter is under enormous stress. Marion’s mother has just died in an asylum, from long-term complications of an inherited bone disorder, which Marion herself had to avoid with a painful operation when she was Nelly’s age. Young Nelly artlessly asks her mother if she can keep her grandmother’s cane, and Marion expressly agrees. Then Marion and her partner (Stéphane Varupenne) take Nelly on a difficult journey to her late mother’s home, where she grew up, and the memories return – particularly that of a secret hut she built in the woods next to the house. Marion is overcome with sadness and leaves Nelly alone with her father. Nelly, being an only child, like her mother, is used to loneliness. Her mother’s absence, whether physical or emotional, is something she has had to deal with all her life.
Playing in the forest, she is faced with what appears to be a semi-finished hut in a clearing. A girl happily waves at her, asking for help to do this. She is the mirror image of Nelly (played by Gabrielle Sanz, evidently Joséphine’s twin sister) and announces that her name is … Marion. After playing together, they return to Marion’s house, which appears to be a mysterious mirror image of Nelly’s mother’s childhood home. And there Nelly meets Marion’s kind and withdrawn mother, in her mid-thirties, who walks painfully with a cane.
It is a ghost story, or a parable, told with a realistic calm. The girls talk about the future and the past as naturally as they would talk about anything else. I found myself holding my breath for long periods, while the young stars strolled leisurely in a single line along the narrative tightrope. They are left alone on the screen for long periods of time, just playing and talking.
“Secrets are not always things we try to hide,” says Nelly to her new best friend. “There is simply no one to tell them.” Its secret is entrusted to us: the public. Perhaps Nelly’s mother was as lonely as a child as Nelly now. Perhaps Nelly always wanted her mother to be a friend, to speak to her as directly and simply as she would with a friend her age. And maybe the adult Marion felt the exact same thing.
I am not being joking when I say that this meeting of the two girls reminded me of Marty McFly’s first meeting with his father in Back to the Future, another brilliant film of a very different kind. There is something eternally strange about the simple fact that your parents were the same age as you, had the same worries, fears and thoughts as you; and, crucially, the same inability to see the future – the future that is you. Making these two characters vulnerable and delicate children is an artistic masterstroke on the part of Sciamma. What an excellent film – a jewel of this year’s Berlin film festival.