It’s 2 March 2020, school’s done for the day, and I’m in my happy place: the middle of row F.
I didn’t know at the time, but in the two hours that would follow I would end up seeing one of the most incredible, majestic, and downright best movies of recent memory. The film in question was Céline Sciamma’s Portrait Of A Lady On Fire.
In the days that followed I would return to the cinema several times, as well as spend hours on end frantically googling to find out as much as I possibly could about the crew behind the film. In short, Portrait Of A Lady On Fire was an absolute game changer for me, not only becoming my favourite movie of that entire year, but also providing me a benchmark with which to evaluate the emotional impact of other similar movies.
But when an artist makes something exceptional that connects to us on a profound level, we build the expectation in our heads that they can do it again. We delude ourselves into thinking that the artist has a responsibility to appeal to our personal emotional needs. If we’re attached to the art, we, by extension, attach ourselves to the artist. It makes sense on some level. Fandom culture takes this to its logical extreme whereby the legions of fans will support an artist regardless of their output, where any discussion of the art itself is deflected because it’s less about the art and more about the star image of the performer.
However, if you’re like me and you care about the art as well as the artist, these skewed expectations can compromise the way you experience a movie. But at the end of the day, my criticisms of any art are always going to be filtered through my personal experience, be it directly connected to the artist or not. Perhaps I shouldn’t even be worrying.
Even so, I was cautious when I walked into Storyhouse to see Céline Sciamma’s latest movie Petite Maman for the first time. Given that I didn’t even know it was coming out until a month before the release date, and the fact that it’s barely feature length (whatever that actually means) coming in at a lean 72 minutes, I was under the impression that since Petite Maman appeared to be aiming lower, it probably wasn’t going to hit me in the same way that Portrait Of A Lady On Fire did. I was wrong.
Petite Maman is the kind of move that, in a perfect world, would inspire a thorough re-examination of Céline Sciamma’s entire filmography. If Portrait Of A Lady On Fire was the moment Céline Sciamma cemented her place in the cultural conversation, Petite Maman is the meticulously crafted follow through that succeeds by all metrics, and proves beyond any doubt that she belongs in that conversation. And when I say that this movie succeeds ‘by all metrics’, I really mean it.
The story is simple: Nelly’s (Joséphine Sanz) grandmother has recently died, and she’s staying at the house where she used to live as her parents help to clear things out. Nelly’s mother Marion (Nina Meurisse) suddenly leaves, and Nelly is curious why. She’s curious about a number of things in fact, including what her parents’ experiences were like when they were children. This curiosity then becomes a reality when Nelly appears to meet her eight-year-old mother when playing in the woods.
What plays out from this can only be described as breath-taking. Sure, it’s a bizarre situation for these kids to find themselves in, but it doesn’t faze them in the slightest. Instead, they retreat inward to a place of childlike wonder, playing make-believe with one another to shut out the darkness of the world. Just like with Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, themes of endings and death loom large over this movie, to the point that Nelly even contemplates the fact that her mother might never return from wherever she’s gone.
I’ve always loved movies that can take heavy themes and filter them through a child’s eyes, accurately portraying how a kid might understand themes of death and mental health. Céline Sciamma is a master of this. She sketches out a character who enjoys the stories that her parents tell her about when they were kids, but is always on the search for more. Through the experience that she goes through in this movie, she finds what she had always been looking for, something beyond the stories that actually gave her an insight into what the experience of being a child was like when her parents were kids.
Céline Sciamma has a strength for making the mundane feel euphoric which aids her in making this point. Whether it’s building a hut in the woods, making pancakes with your friend, or going on a boat trip across a lake, everything is filtered through childhood innocence which makes these moments feel so much bigger than they probably actually were. Fleeting moments are coloured by huge emotions.
Ultimately, it can be hard for children to understand that there was a time when their parents were once kids, in the same way that those parents have no idea what it’s like being a kid in the modern world. That’s the point that this movie boils down to. The journey that Nelly has gone through during her childhood is very different to what Marion would have gone through, but during their connection as kids they find common ground amidst all of it, social hierarchies be damned. That’s another thing. Marion is just as emotionally vulnerable a character as Nelly, both as a child and an adult. She might act as a mentor figure for Nelly (as you’d expect as her mother), but at no point is she framed as having any more authority in the family than her. They rely on each other, something that Nelly doesn’t entirely realise until the end.
But all of that thematic depth would be null and void if the movie wasn’t technically up to scratch but given that Céline Sciamma is working with her usual collaborators it goes without saying the movie is visually stunning. The cinematography is raw and intimate, the editing is as tight as ever (seriously Juilen Lacheray is long overdue some serious recognition) and the music in this movie is absolutely exceptional. The song that plays during the climax where the two girls are off on their boat trip across the lake is the stuff of dreams. Composer Jean-Baptiste de Laubier did an amazing job with it.
There’s only one way I feel I can truly summarise my adoration for this movie. Petite Maman feels like it was born from the same DNA as Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s 2014 classic When Marnie Was There. They are both about kids who are wise beyond their years and forced to grow up a bit too fast, they’re both about the importance of family connection, and they both end on a glorious note of hope that, however much it might not feel like it right now, things do get better, and simply being alive is worth it for those family connections alone. When Marnie Was There is my favourite movie of all time, so if that’s not high praise, I don’t know what is.
Petite Maman is coming to MUBI on 4 February 2022.