Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Petite Maman’ on VOD, Celine Sciamma’s Sad and Lovely Drama Touching on Grief, Wonder and Femininity

Now on VOD, Petite Maman is filmmaker Celine Sciamma’s follow-up to 2019’s masterful Portrait of a Lady on Fire, so yes, hey there, take notice, please. Both are quiet, thoughtful, contemplative films, but where Portrait was richly sensual in both sexy and non-sexy ways, Petite Maman’s charm derives from its youthful innocence, being the story of an eight-year-old girl coping with significant loss and coming across something magical in the forest.

PETITE MAMAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Nelly (Josephine Sanz) goes room to room in the nursing home, saying goodbye, goodbye, goodbye to the elderly women she’s befriended. The last room she enters is empty save for her mother (Nina Meurisse) and a weighty sense of loss. Nelly asks if she can keep the cane propped against the bed. Mother says yes. They get in the car and follow Nelly’s father (Stephane Varupenne) in a large truck. Nelly gets out some snacks and munches away. Close-up on Mother as she drives: A little hand reaches from off screen to feed her cheese doodles, and then a sip from a juice box. Mother smiles a little and two little hands reach around the seat back to give her a hug.

It’s late when they get to the house. Mother carries Nelly in. It’s dark and the furniture is covered with sheets. The next day, Nelly asks her mom about the hut out in the woods that she played in as a child. She’ll show it to her when she has time, Mother says, but now, she and Father have to clean out Grandmother’s house. Nelly wanders the woods alone, finds a large uprooted tree, finds a peaceful clearing, finds a stump with a hole so she can take a few steps back and toss acorns into it. She returns and sits with her mom while she looks through her childhood belongings. That night, Nelly and Mother sit in the dark. “The last goodbye wasn’t good. Because I didn’t know,” Nelly says. But she couldn’t know, no one could know, Mother replies. They end up sleeping on a couch together and when Nelly wakes up, Mother is gone. She had to leave, Father says, leaving it vague, although we all maybe know how hard it was for her to be there.

Nelly goes outside to explore, past the uprooted tree and clearing to the spot with the four trees where Mother’s hut was. Correction: is. A collection of limbs forms a makeshift shelter, and a little girl works to build it up. We squint at the screen. Is she Nelly’s doppelganger? Yes, yes she is, but Nelly doesn’t seem at all surprised or upset. Nonplussed maybe, quietly delighted, almost certainly. Her name is Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), and she too is eight years old. Thunder rumbles and rain falls and they dash up the path to Marion’s house, which is exactly like Grandmother’s house, except it doesn’t feel so chilly and empty. They dry off, have some cocoa together. Nelly walks down the hall to use the bathroom and pokes into a bedroom and sees an older woman (Margo Abascal) asleep in the bed and that’s at last what spooks Nelly, at least for a moment, because she sure seems to be looking at her Grandmother, who had died just a few days before.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Petite Maman achieves what Benh Zeitlin didn’t quite reach with his Peter Pan interpretation Wendy; Sciamma taps into a purer, cleaner well of magical realism that addresses a desire to remember things as they were because it’s preferable to the way the are now.

Performance Worth Watching: Gabrielle and Josephine Sanz occupy every frame of this film – either together or apart – and show a remarkable ability for naturalist performance. Few child actors can disacknowledge the camera and work with such memorable authenticity.

Memorable Dialogue: “You know, secrets aren’t always things we try to hide,” Marion says. “Sometimes there’s no one to tell them to.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Apt for a film about a period of transition, note Sciamma and editor Julien Lacheray’s subtle scene transitions, and how they denote contrast between Marion and Nelly’s respective “worlds.” We exist in a time where “multiverse” and time-travel stories are a trend, and are frequently high-concept fodder in search of solid emotional footing. Petite Maman builds from the ground up, starting with the mundane, a grieving family, and working with purpose, through longing and dysphoria, toward the fantastical. The magic begins not with a flash or a bang, but with what seems like an ordinary coincidence, Mother’s departure and Marion’s arrival, which soon reveals itself to be quite extraordinary.

Sciamma acutely keeps us rooted in the prosaics of the moment with deliberate emphasis on sound design; the crunch of Nelly eating cereal, the scratch of pencil on paper and the shucking sound of hair being brushed are all prevalent, and the only instance of music occurs an hour into this exquisitely honed 72-minute film, making the moment of emotional elevation truly count. Simple intimacy makes every scene resonant: Mother telling Nelly about the “black panther” that emerged from the shadows to rest on her bed at night; Nelly smearing shaving cream on her father’s face; Marion and Nelly playing like the sweet children they are, giggling as they recklessly crack eggs and stir pancake batter. The film acknowledges the pain we feel in the wake of death, a universal notion, and renders it profoundly empathetic in its detail and specificity, and its implications about generational femininity. The film doesn’t build to a calculated and contrived catharsis, but rather, a deeper understanding of what it means to love.

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Our Call: Petite Maman is a quiet, tender exploration of loss, told with great clarity and purpose. And perhaps most crucially, Sciamma finds joy and wonder amidst the melancholy. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.