'Petite Maman' (2021) Review

There’s no rule (nor should there be) for what a movie needs to be or how it needs to to impact viewers. One of the many magical elements of movies is the way they get us to reflect on our lives and relationships to others…

PG - Drama/Fantasy (78 minutes)

dir. Céline Sciamma

Starring Joséphine Sanz, Gabrielle Sanz, Stéphane Varupenne, Nina Meurisse, Margo Abascal

---

If you knew that the film industry was about to implode and that the end of the theatrical experience was imminent—that you only would have another one or two movies to watch before it all shut down—what would you want to see? Some people might pick a familiar favorite or beloved classic. My choice would undoubtedly be something new and mind-blowing. It’s a tall order, but this was basically what happened in March 2020, in the final weeks before everything shut down and we moved along in our trajectory toward desensitization toward the apocalypse. It looked like the last movie I’d get to see was Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. And you can never know just how much you’ll click with a movie, even if the reviews are great and the trailer looks magical, but I’ll stand by my reaction that Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a full-blown masterpiece with one of the best endings I’ve ever seen. It still haunts me two years later and never loses its potency when I return to it. In other words, I could not have asked for a better movie to be my last hurrah for my beloved, sacred space: the movie theater. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is one of those movies that makes you believe cinema isn’t dead after all. Perhaps that very optimism then led to the hubris necessary to squeeze one more movie into my schedule before the theaters all shut down. That actual last movie I saw was Damon Lindelof’s attempt at both-sides satire in the truly abysmal The Hunt—the kind of movie that makes you think movies had a good run but it’s maybe time to pack it up. 

But here we are: movies are sort of back in the sense that theaters are open and screening to the public again. It feels sort of like a post-apocalyptic cinematic landscape, where the warlord Kevin Feige continues to dominate and invade every remaining screen that isn’t playing his work and where audiences are mostly cool with that. It’s hard to tell how long this phase will last—either in the messianic sense of promised superhero fatigue one day or in the practical sense of the streaming revolution more firmly imprinting our viewing habits. That sense I had in March 2020 that this might be the last batch of movies I get to see in a theater has sort of returned in a more undefined awareness that I should appreciate every time I get to see something interesting in a theater because who knows how long the option will exist for? The landscape isn’t what it was just a few years ago. It’s bizarre to see something like The Northman, a $70 million epic revenge thriller getting labeled as an art-house movie, which is slowly just becoming a signifier for non-superhero. The art-house has always existed as an imperfect but resilient haven for the weird, small, and personal, for movies that you don’t always already know how to watch. Welcome to the club, big budget action movies.

Céline Sciamma’s latest film, Petite Maman, is art-house in ways that make a lot more obvious sense than something like The Northman. It’s small, quiet, has no big set pieces or stars, and most unusually for the last few years, it’s short. An interesting complication in the streaming era is that studios often would set contractual obligations on runtimes for filmmakers in order to ensure a maximum number of possible screenings in a day–usually around 120 minutes–whereas streamers will ask a filmmaker how long they are willing to make something so they can maximize total number of minutes streamed. I attribute this to the trend where 140 minutes is the average as opposed to 120 or the even more traditional 90 minutes. Of course, runtime is largely arbitrary—there isn’t a reason why any movie needs to be a particular amount of time other than that our attention spans and bodies can only endure so much stillness and focus. Finding that perfect amount of story and the most effective amount of time to tell it in is its own art, and Sciamma is right to keep Petite Maman short and sweet without overstaying its welcome or overcomplicating its simple premise at a brisk 78 minutes.

The film follows Nelly, an eight-year-old whose grandmother has just died and whose parents take her to the old family home where Nelly’s mother, Marion, grew up. Marion struggles to clean the house, to say goodbye to the memories it contains so soon after saying goodbye to her mother. Nelly is haunted by the fact that she never got to say goodbye to her grandmother at all and that their last interaction was unpleasant. When Marion suddenly leaves Nelly and her father in the home to continue the work that she cannot emotionally endure anymore, Nelly tries to process her feelings about her grandmother and mother. She wants to understand them as people rather than as familial concepts, and suddenly she finds herself able to transport back to Marion’s childhood where the two meet in the woods both as eight-year-olds. They get to know each other and, more poignantly, Nelly gets to understand her family. 

The details are best left for the viewer to discover in this quick journey through the past, which I’m not sure is quite sci-fi or fantasy so much as a metaphor for an internal journey expressed externally—cinematically, even. Sciamma’s style is eloquently simple–often the camera draws no attention to itself despite its clear intentionality. As in her previous films, what the camera often does is capture characters processing emotions, sometimes through dialogue and other times silently as they try to understand each other. Portrait of a Lady on Fire was much more explicitly about gazing and the authorship and meaning within looking. If there is a distinction between looking and seeing, then Petite Maman is about the latter. Nelly wants to see Marion—not her mother— when looking at her, and the film’s journey lets her do so; suggesting in the end that Marion sees Nelly, too. 

Much of the structure and technique here mirrors Portrait of a Lady on Fire: two people in a remote location finding a profound connection that will by necessity be over after these few moments. They share joy, grief, understanding, and ultimately a song. Sciamma uses music sparingly, which turns out to be an excellent instinct because it imbues what little soundtrack there is with a rich emotionality and reaches a highly effective impact. It’s difficult to watch Petite Maman and not to see it in the shadow of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, an echo or variation, though this isn’t to say that it doesn’t pack an emotional punch or stand as a great film even within some of its familiar elements. Sciamma is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today, building her cinematic language with a focus on feelings we all have, questions we ask, and connections we long for. I see a personal, shared human experience within her work that embodies the promise of the traditional art-house film. 

There’s no rule (nor should there be) for what a movie needs to be or how it needs to to impact viewers. One of the many magical elements of movies is the way they get us to reflect on our lives and relationships to others, in the perhaps oversimplified but still resonant Ebert line that film is an empathy machine. Understanding our family may be one of the most human urges there is. Petite Maman in that sense has a universal perspective, longing, and, in the end, catharsis. We call this kind of movie art-house, and pretty much always have. And now you can see it on the screen next to its new neighbor with that other universal art-house longing: avenge father, save mother, kill Fjölnor. 

Petite Maman is in theaters now.