Review: Mothers, daughters and magic in ‘Petite Maman’
20.04.2022 - 23:23
/ abcnews.go.com
Céline Sciamma’s “ Petite Maman ” couldn’t be more different in scope and scale from “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” There are no castles, or corsets or waves crashing up against craggy cliffs. There is no sex or lust or desire. Yet emotionally, the quiet, restrained and exceptionally tender “Petite Maman” is on equal footing.
And from one angle, they’re both ultimately about goodbyes.Women and girlhood are also at the heart of this latest endeavor, which runs a slim 72 minutes. But instead of a rapturous relationship, the lens here is the whimsical notion of what it might be like for an 8-year-old to spend time with her mother at age 8.There are so many traps and pitfalls when it comes to depicting young girlhood. Movies can overromanticize, infantilize or instill incongruously adult wisdom in young characters.
Sweetness becomes saccharine and nostalgia a crutch. But Sciamma is able to bring to life essential truths of what it is like to be that strange age and the sometimes frightening, sometimes wonderful vastness of a limitless imagination. And she even does it without a background score to manipulate our tear ducts.Her heroine here is Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), who has just lost her beloved grandmother.
We meet her in the nursing home where she and her mother Marion (Nina Meurisse) are collecting her things. Nelly, who like many 8-year-old girls is a bit of an old soul, methodically and respectfully goes from room to room to bid farewell to the fellow residents. Marion meanwhile is distracted by grief and the daunting check list that follows the death of a parent, especially when that death was not exactly a surprise but not entirely expected either.
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