ABOUT FILMS BY YEAR MY 100 FAVORITES FEATURES HOME
About Films By Year My 100 Favorites Features

Seeking out the

5000 greatest films

in a century of cinema

Petite Maman

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Directed by Céline Sciamma
Produced by Bénédicte Couvreur
Written by Céline Sciamma
With: Joséphine Sanz, Gabrielle Sanz, Nina Meurisse, Stéphane Varupenne, and Margot Abascal
Cinematography: Claire Mathon
Editing: Julien Lacheray
Music: Jean-Baptiste de Laubier
Runtime: 72 min
Release Date: 02 June 2021
Aspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1
Color: Color
After her 2019 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma wisely downshifts from the expansive emotional canvas of (for my money) the best film of the entire previous decade to this small, but by no means minor, picture. Petite Maman is the story of an eight-year-old girl named Nelly, an only child who has just lost her maternal grandmother. Nelly and her parents return to her mother's childhood home to pack it up and clean it out. While playing in the woods, Nelly meets up with another eight-year-old girl named Marion who bears an uncanny resemblance to her. The two strike up a friendship that lasts for the limit of Nelly’s visit, and provides a brief escape from the melancholy nature of her stay in the now empty house.

Petite Maman is a rare meditation on grief and loss as seen through the eyes of a child. It’s also one of a small handful of kids' films that exist purely within the genre of magical realism as opposed to fantasy. The 72-minute movie explores its themes in much the same way a great short story can. A good deal of the picture unfolds in silence, or at least without dialogue. And it has the deliberate pacing of a movie from an earlier time—one that takes place in an era before kids had cellphones and iPads to keep them entertained. The young star, Joséphine Sanz, appears in every scene, captivating the viewer and inviting us to experience the film from her perspective.

Sciamma’s work has always explored female identity and the emotional bonds between women (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), teenage girls (Water Lilies and Girlhood), and children (Tomboy). Up until Portrait, her pictures were grounded firmly in present-day reality. Petite Maman is distinctly ungrounded in both time and verisimilitude, but it captures youthful (and not so youthful) emotions with genuine insight. It’s an imaginative twist on my favorite type of movie—the brief encounter picture.

 Twitter Capsule:
Sciamma spins an enchanting short story about an unusual kind of brief encounter; a rare grief/loss picture from a child’s POV told via magical realism rather than fantasy.
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