Joséphine Sanz

A few rare writer-directors calmly, enchantingly spark our imaginations to enter a unique what if realm of visual magic. Exactly such a captivating world invites our fanciful participation in Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman, in which a unique mother-daughter relationship takes center stage. The straightforward setup establishes eight-year-old Nelly at her recently deceased grandmother’s house ready for her parents to shutter. Layers of intergenerational bonds become clear through poignant emotional understatement. At a measured, perfect seventy-two minutes, Petite Maman suggests more about a child’s psychological environment than volumes of literature. It is haunting, insightful, and quite simply profound.

A fairytale, a ghost story, a spare meditation on grief, loss, motherhood and the delicate mysteries of childhood — Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman is all these things adding up to a deeply moving, spellbinding film that evokes tenderness and heartbreak in delving into what children can never know about a parent and what a gift it is to imagine glimpsing that precious unknowable, even for a moment.

French director and writer Celine Sciamma follows up her much admired 2019’s historical romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire with Petite Maman, a more intimate and timely film about death, grief and losing your loved ones. It also features probably the best pair of acting twins since those creepy girls who haunted the Overlook Hotel in 1980’s The Shining.

It is sheer genius for director Celine Sciamma, who also wrote the screenplay, to level the playing field by bringing mother and daughter together as peers to talk about the things that really matter to them—young Marion’s fear of an operation she is to undergo in three days’ time and Nelly’s worry that she is the cause of her mother’s melancholy (young Marion reassures her as only the honesty of a child can that “you didn’t invent my sadness.”) Nelly, who confesses to her older mother that she wishes she had given her grandmother a proper good-bye, gets a chance at a do-over, albeit with a younger version.

Celine Sciamma is the quintessence of female filmmaking. In all her films, she values emotional intelligence, and uses the female lens to examine life and universal truths through stories about women’s experiences and relationships. Her female characters are multidimensional and exist on their own terms, often apart from, or with very little influence from, the men around them. A look here, the touch of a hand there, cooperation in a task together, a verbal exchange where a secret is shared or somehow reveals a character’s fears and hopes, these are her building blocks. With Petite Maman she creates an immersive experience, and one in which most women will see themselves in some way.