A Small Treasure in Petite Maman
On a Monday night, I walked out of Petit Maman with a soft smile, a lingering effect of the movie’s sweetness. It made me curious, because it’s a rare feeling to walk out of a movie with—far rarer than the rush of a superhero movie, the hollowing dread of Scorsese’s or Schrader’s latest, or the mental contortions of a rug-pulling mystery. Instead, I continued to smile, letting that deep gentleness fade as slowly as it could.
In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard wrote of the outsized power of small things. “Thus the miniscule, a narrow gate, opens an entire world.” Speaking of shells, he wrote that “when we accept slight amazement, we prepare ourselves to imagine great amazement.” This opening, widened by the imagination, is animated by a singular spirit: “Enduring interest should begin with the original amazement of a naïve observer.”
Original amazement is all over Céline Sciamma’s latest, Petit Maman. It’s is a quiet film by any standard—quieter than Sciamma’s Girlhood or Portrait of a Lady on Fire. But for all its simple wonder and charm, Petit Maman is definitively equal work of a deeply skilled and contemplative director.
Sciamma’s film follows Nelly as her parents clear out her recently deceased grandmother’s house. As her parents work, the eight year old Nelly explores the woods of her mother’s childhood, until she stumbles into another little girl, Marion, who—well, it’s right there in the title.
Nelly’s curiosity quietly overcomes any desire to plumb the mystery, instead centering childhood joy and grief. She plays with Marion, building a forest fort, making pancakes, sketching out and acting out a play of intrigue and melodrama. Underneath the play is a probing of hurt and possibility as Marion speaks of her fears about her upcoming surgery, and Nelly runs into her (much younger) grandmother.
That’s truly the fullness of the plot. There’s little conflict, but that doesn’t take away any depth. Petit Maman is a movie filled with the soft love of gestures, the memories that live on in the details of patterns, the stories residing in the most mundane of items. Nelly is given a mystical opportunity to discover her mother anew as a friend, moved by the same childhood fears and delights as she is.
Sciamma cares about the lives of these characters, young and old alike, their heartache and compassion. I always admire stories that depict interactions between adults and children with refreshing honesty, and Petit Maman does so in warm, generative fashion.
Even with so small and simple a story, Petit Maman is constantly marked by the fingerprints of an expert filmmaker. The edits alternately breathe heavy as sighs and gasp in sharp delight—one particular cut with a light switch is the most playful directorial choice I’ve seen on screen in a very long time. In weighty moments, Sciamma brightens the scene with the levity of childhood; in fun ones, she provides a knowing touch of the passing of time.
It’s not catharsis, not quite mourning or celebration. It’s something distinct, rarely seen in a theater. As Bachelard wrote, “By solving small problems, we teach ourselves to solve large ones.” Petit Maman is a decisively small film, but by giving space to warmth and sadness alike, it carries a grandeur attendant to the griefs and joys of life. It’s a work of great amazement.
