The accompaniment to “Portrait of a lady on fire”, by Céline Sciamma, lasts only 72 minutes, but it seems endless.
Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), 8, is sitting in the back seat of her mother’s car, outside the nursing home where her beloved grandmother just died, and observes her young parents (Nina Meurisse and Stéphane through the window) Varupenne) share an embrace contest. The slightly questioning look on Nelly’s face suggests that she hasn’t seen them embrace in a while – that perhaps this moment is doubly charged. She wonders what they mean to each other, what it’s like to lose someone forever, and if your mother ever sat alone in a car on a gray autumn afternoon and watched your mother was comforted your mother’s death. Nelly understands that her mother didn’t make it 31 without having eight along the way, but why is this so hard to imagine? It’s like looking at a bird and trying to imagine when it was a dinosaur.
Nelly doesn’t say a word about it, but she doesn’t have to; we only met the girl a few minutes ago, and yet the screen between us has already melted as if we were sharing her experience first hand. This is at least part of what Céline Sciamma does better than any other writer-director working today. Her characters open up like pores soaked in hot water and the hyper-real worlds around them – from the apartment complexes of contemporary Paris in “Girlhood” to the sweeping 18th-century coast of Brittany in her masterpiece “Portrait of a Lady on Fire “- reveal themselves with a sense of discovery so acute that even the most everyday moments take on a life-changing charge.
This has never been more palpable than in Petite Maman, which resembles a jewel by Sciamma, which shows the filmmaker literally going back to his roots for another refined adulthood story about a young woman on the verge of a new self-understanding. Or would it be more correct to call it denialhistory of an age? It is true that Nelly grows up over the course of the film, but – as the title of Sciamma suggests – the high-concept plot depends more on Nelly’s mother getting smaller. Going back to being a dinosaur, so to speak.
Nelly’s family returns to their late grandmother’s rustic cottage to spend a few days sorting things out, but when the wide-eyed child wakes up the next morning, she finds out that her mother is missing. Later that afternoon, near the tree fort her mother built as a child, Nelly meets an eight-year-old girl who looks just like her, only with a different coat and a somewhat bristly countenance. It is strange that Marion (Gabrielle Sanz) shares the same name as Nelly’s mother, even stranger that she lives in a still furnished version of Nelly’s grandmother’s house, and totally surreal than Nelly’s grandmother (the fortieth Margot Abascal) still be living there too. She is making soup for lunch.
It’s a premise that looks just as mature for an episode of “The Twilight Zone” or a live-action Disney movie, but Sciamma opts for a more spectral tone, so rooted in the reality of children’s fantasy that you kind of expect Nelly and Marion trip over a catbus station when it starts to rain. The film’s press notes cite Miyazaki as a great inspiration, with the vibrations of “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away” growing especially pronounced throughout a story that blurs the soft boundaries between the real and invented worlds. (Sciamma’s own “Tomboy” is also relevant, as it marks the last time she worked with actors close to that age.)
The result is both the most common and the most enchanting thing Sciamma has done so far, a wise and delicate piece of film that recreates the same time-collapsing effect of the wormhole in the tree fort that allows Nelly and her mother to reach the years and flatten the gap that has always kept them on opposite sides of the forest. It is a slit that measures exactly the same length since Nelly was born, and will not start to close until Marion dies. Children understand this gap from an early age, while those who become parents one day tend to find that it looks distressingly similar on the other side.
And so, “Petite Maman”, although accessible to children, is not just their fantasy. It belongs to anyone who has ever felt a distance from the people they love most in the world; who knows that secrets are not only the things we hide from each other, but also the things we never find the language to share.
Dreamed of during quarantine, limited to a small group of studio and autumnal outdoor scenarios (including the same woods that Sciamma used to play as a child) and running for only 72 minutes, “Petite Maman” is a far cry from the white type. expecting someone out of a popular favorite like “Portrait of a burning lady,” and viewers who hope to be knocked down by the same kind of emotional punch may be disappointed by a story that starts with two unhappy kids making pancakes.
But Sciamma has always been able to squeeze the blood out of a stone, and his latest film (shot by “Portrait” cinematographer Claire Mathon) is made with such invisible ingenuity and emotional poignancy that he never feels the least bit compromised. One of the first pictures of a car, in which Nelly’s hands get in and out of sight as she feeds her mother cookies in the back seat, shows the kind of non-moment that would be cut out of most films in an unforgettable portrait of space that separates even the most loving of parents and children – a space that they can reach from time to time, but never share completely.
Sciamma’s characteristically discreet approach eliminates all the obvious dramatic beats. Nelly’s adventure is not motivated by some kind of fight with the mother, but by a loving conversation in which the father says “You always ask questions at bedtime” and the child responds with the type of velvet hammer that children do not even notice that they are swinging: “That’s when I see you”.
If several other films have been shown in this sandbox before (Sciamma cites Judge Reinhold / Fred Savage’s “Vice Versa” opus as a particularly clever inspiration), “Petit Maman” separates from the group abandoning the usual body-changing tropes in favor of putting your characters on an equal footing. The scenes between Nelly and young Marion unfold with the discreet naturalness of two sisters trying to pass the time; the two Sanz brothers (twins?) do a perfect job of exploring Sciamma’s reactive gaze and start having fun with him at the precise moment when the film around them looks like it is about to suffocate with the melancholy seriousness of his great ideas .
Although never frightening, “Petite Maman” does not resist the specter of death or denies the haunted nature of its ghostly premise; Sciamma maintains a lasting fascination with supernatural manifestations of regret, and there are details here (the soft focus in one scene, the menacing design of Marion’s tree fort in another) that suggest material for a killer horror film one day. There is even the imminent threat of some type of ominous medical operation. But these are not the affects borrowed from a film bored of its own genre. Instead, they are a crucial element of the bridge that connects Nelly with her mother, as Sciamma insists that you can’t really meet someone until you understand what scares them the most.
It is not anyone’s fault that our relationships ossify in these roles, it is just the fact that families start listening to each other. We try to find a certain harmony, but children follow their parents like the rhythm of a song. “You don’t forget”, one generation of Sciamma characters says the other, “you just don’t listen”. But this is the miracle of this film: for 72 minutes, everyone can hear each other as clearly as if they were talking to themselves. If only it could last forever.
Grade A-
“Petite Maman” debuted in competition at the 2021 Berlinale. It is currently seeking distribution in the United States.
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