In Praise of Small Hope: Petite Maman and Ambivalent Motherhood

Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman is a movie that, in many ways, shouldn’t have worked. Made during lockdown with a cast of five, two of whom are eight-year-old twins, it is a cross-generational, time-travel film that flouts the narrative framework by which cross-generational and time-travel films (Big, Vice Versa, Back to the Future) have been known to succeed: young person who finds parent hopelessly clueless visits the past and realizes 1) their parent was once young like them, with a comparably raucous array of insecurities, quirks, and lovable vices, and 2) the cultural circumstances that surrounded that parent’s youth were once, miraculously, cool in their own right. Petite Maman does not concern itself with how much “things have changed” externally from era to era, but rather with how little, if anything, changes between mothers’ and daughters’ interior landscapes. Girlhood, specifically, is less an exuberant, and inherently superficial, stage of emotional and sartorial expression so much as an introspective period of discovery, resourcefulness, and significant loss. Motherhood, too, is devoid of pat virtue and ready transcendence; who is mothering whom is of consistent debate.

The plot is at once as austere and audacious as Sciamma’s signature cinematographic style: a girl named Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) loses her grandmother and sets off from the nursing home with her mother Marion (Nina Meurisse) to her bucolic childhood home, which Nelly has never visited, to clear the house with her mellow husband (Stéphane Varupenne). After Marion abruptly departs the second morning of their stay, Nelly is left to entertain herself on her own, seeking out the spot where her mother once built a tree fort long ago in the nearby woods. It is there that she meets another eight-year-old girl (Gabrielle Sanz), her more delicate, feminine doppelganger, dragging timber to form a fort herself. After a few days festooning the cabin with fiery foliage, Nelly realizes that Young Marion is, in fact, her own mother, and the woods an autumnal portal to the past. Their domiciles are identical, but for the presence of Marion’s infirm mother (Margot Abascal), Nelly’s grandmother in middle age, suffering from an unnamed hereditary affliction for which eight-year-old Marion must be treated in an impending operation.

Much has been already made of Sciamma’s shift away from the erotic charge and scenic grandeur of her 2019 Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which chronicles an 18th century love affair on a Breton island between an aristocratic woman, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), and her portraitist Marianne (Noémie Merlant). But in so many ways, Petite Maman is invested in the same one-on-one interactions and hushed intimacies of daily life. As few critics have noted, Portrait did not indulge in the predictably decadent ballroom scene of obscenely formal yet debauched merrymaking between members of the noblesse, nor did it include more than a handful of scenes that included more than two or three characters. In both films, the camera is fixed the vast majority of the time on two or three women—if not one woman, or girl, willfully moving through the world on her own.

While Nelly and Young Marion’s relationship is familial and unequivocally platonic, the ways in which it tenderly flourishes—board games, cocoa drinking, messily mixing crepe batter—resemble the late-night rounds of cards between Héloïse, Marianne, and Sophie, their servant. What Sciamma is clearly concerned with is closeness between women, and girls, and how naturally female bonds, erotic or not, can blossom. In both Portrait and Petite, the camera lingers on the splendid tensions inherent in the vicissitudes of early friendship: pausing before asking another’s name, how old she is, whether she can play with you the following day—these risks are no less so in the platonic realm than the erotic. Sciamma insists on the seriousness of friendship, just as she insists on the complexity of childhood. Per her restrained mise en scène, extensive dialogue is swapped for potently auditory sensory experience...