72 min | PG | April 22, 2022 | Neon
An eight-year-old loses her grandmother and helps clear out the family’s old house in the woods. There she meets a girl her own age who turns out to be her mother as a child. Céline Sciamma builds an entire ghost story out of tenderness and tells it without raising her voice.
Nelly is eight years old when her grandmother dies. She rides along while her parents empty the dead woman’s house at the edge of a forest. Her mother packs a single bag and leaves without explaining why. Alone in the woods, Nelly meets a girl her own age who is building a hut from fallen branches. The girl is named Marion, and she is Nelly’s mother as a child. The film uses that premise to ask what it would mean to meet a parent before grief and adulthood closed over her.
Joséphine Sanz plays Nelly with a watchfulness that never tips into precocity. She studies adults from across rooms and files away what she sees. Gabrielle Sanz plays Marion with more spring and mischief, a child who has not yet learned to hold back. The two actors are sisters, and the resemblance does the work that a hundred lines of dialogue would labor over. Nina Meurisse plays the mother in a few short scenes and carries a sadness she will not name in front of her daughter. Stéphane Varupenne plays the father shaving away his beard at the kitchen sink, a small act of a man trying to start over.
Céline Sciamma writes and directs without a single special effect to mark the slip between decades. The two timelines look identical because they are the same house and the same forest, and the camera holds steady at the height of a child. Sciamma frames the woods in flat autumn light and lets long takes run while the girls cook pancakes or paddle a small boat across a pond. The score stays silent through most of the film and arrives once, on the water, where it lifts the whole picture off the ground. The restraint is the technique. Sciamma trusts the plainness of the images to carry a premise that a louder film would drown in spectacle.
The film wastes nothing and gives away nothing it does not need. It treats a child’s reasoning as the natural language of grief, where the wish to comfort your mother becomes a girl in the woods who answers it. Sciamma has made a fantasy with no interest in the machinery of fantasy. She wants only the feeling underneath it. Petite Maman is a quiet film about the questions we never get to ask our parents and the brief, impossible grace of asking them anyway.