Celine Sciamma’s Tender New Film

Petite Maman, is now available to to stream on MUBI in the U.K. The film is being distributed by Neon in the U.S., where it will have its theatrical release on April 22. Written and directed by acclaimed French filmmaker of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma, Petite Maman is an endearing mother-daughter story full of tenderness.

Petite Maman follows eight-year-old Nelly (played by Joséphine Sanz) as she accompanies her parents to her grandmother’s house. Nelly’s maternal grandmother has passed away, and her mother (played by Nina Meurisse) with the help of her father (played by Stéphane Varupenne) must clear the now-empty house. Nelly bonds with her mother in an unexpected and fantastical way. The day Nelly ventures in the adjacent woods to play and look for her mother’s wooden fort, she meets another little girl. Her name is Marion (played by Gabrielle Sanz).

Céline Sciamma returns to a powerful and intimate coming-of-age drama with Petite Maman. This is a film that effortlessly dives into the world and perspective of a child. It is a deeply moving story about grieving and the fusional bond between a daughter and her mother.

Eight-year-old Nelly goes from room to room saying goodbye to residents of the retiring home her grandmother was in. As this opening sequence suggests, Petite Maman is a story about saying goodbye, or more specifically how death steals the opportunity of saying a proper goodbye to those we love, no matter how prepared one is for its inevitable coming. Later, as Nelly snuggles next to her mother on the couch, she confesses that she regrets how she parted with her grandmother. She does not like the way she said goodbye the last time she saw her grandmother. She didn’t know it would be the last time. One never knows, her mother replies.

It isn’t with her grandmother that Nelly will find a connection while staying at her house. It is her mother. The film is at its most magical when Nelly meets her eight-year-old mother, Marion. The two little girls bond over constructing the fort in the woods, and then when they start playing make-belief together. At its core, Petite Maman is about a young girl trying to understand her mother’s sadness, and ostensively, her grief.

Nelly’s mother leaves early, finding it too much for her to be in her childhood home. The film stops many times on her saddened silent expression. But it is clear that Nelly does not understand it. Nelly will say a few times throughout the film that she doesn’t know why her mother left so abruptly. This is when she meets Marion in the woods, Nelly’s mother when she was eight herself. The film leaves it subtly open for interpretation whether Nelly really does travel back in time to visit her eight-year-old mother. There are a few editing choices that suggest perhaps this is Nelly imagining the childhood memories her mother told her about. Nelly steps into this alternate world, here the past, like one steps into someone else’s memory. But the magic of meeting one’s mother as a child prevails over all else. This is a film, first and foremost, about the intense magical bond that exists between a daughter and her mother, and links them together. The very same bond Nelly’s mother, Marion, has now lost.

“Petite maman” is a term of endearment for mothers in French. The title suggests a daughter’s tender love for her mother, as well as denoting the fact that Nelly’s mother will return to being her child self in the film. But, isn’t that what we all do when we lose a parent, forced to return to our childhood home, which you must now empty from all its furniture, while remaining filled to the brim with memories? We return to those early memories, to that state of being, when we were dependent on our parents. In a way, it seems that in Sciamma’s film, these memories are too painful for Nelly’s mother, it is therefore Nelly who (re)visits them for her.

Sciamma’s film explores, through Nelly’s character, how children approach death, without completely understanding its implication. Petite Maman movingly shows how the loss of someone resuscitates old memories, where a time long past is revisited.

Petite Maman is a profound film with a little magic, about shared memories and the special bond that lies between a daughter and her mother.