Does the delicate task of directing kids grow a little easier when they are sisters in real life, and thus used to the mess and the toss?Īs for Nelly and her double, so for Sciamma. It’s remarkable how unsweet and anti-cute the movie is, given the innocence of their chosen joys one sequence, in which they make pancakes, is every bit as messy as you would hope, and it’s almost as if the actresses were, for a moment, unaware of the camera’s presence. But Paulette’s fantasy was forged, under traumatic pressure, by the cruelties of war, whereas the kids in “Petite Maman” seem at peace in their inventiveness, and wholly at ease with the trick of fate that has brought them together.
The performance of Brigitte Fossey as a five-year-old named Paulette, creating her own private cemetery in René Clément’s “Forbidden Games” (1952), is indelible. Gradually, even for viewers as slow on the uptake as myself, the truth dawns: this Marion is Nelly’s mother, as a child.Ĭinema has schooled us in the role-play of the young. And, two, the other girl’s name is Marion. One, the house is apparently the same as the grandmother’s house-or, rather, as it used to be, years ago, with the whole kitchen papered in the pattern that we saw behind the dresser. (The other girl is played by Gabrielle Sanz, Joséphine’s twin sister.) On subsequent days, Nelly is invited to her doppelgänger’s house for snacks, drinks, larking around, dressing up, and finally a sleepover. What neither of them sees fit to mention, perhaps because it feels quite natural, is that they are identical. The two of them team up, carrying branches together a friendship is established in the act of doing. There, she sees a girl of her own age, who is busy building a den and asks for help.
One day, Nelly, who has no siblings, walks into the woods. The movie could be called “ What Nelly Knew.” (At one point, Marion goes away for a couple of days, as though everything has become too much.) Inquisitive and imperturbable, Nelly is our guide through the story, which somehow unfolds on her initiative. For a while, indeed, it occurred to me that he might be Marion’s brother, sharing her grief we certainly sense that something is amiss in their relationship-or, rather, we are tuned into Nelly’s awareness of that flaw.
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There are games and puzzles that she played, books that she read, and a patch of yellowing wallpaper behind the kitchen dresser, which reminds her of the walls that she knew.Īlso in evidence is Nelly’s father (Stéphane Varupenne), who is unnamed, and who, like Marion, seems taciturn, benign, and bowed down. Marion dwelled there as a child-for how long, we don’t know, but traces of that period are everywhere. Next stop is the secluded house of the deceased, which needs to be cleared, presumably in order to be sold. Ever polite, Nelly goes and says goodbye to some of the other residents, while her mother, Marion (Nina Meurisse), tidies the room where the grandmother died. We first meet Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), aged eight, in the wake of her grandmother’s passing, in an old people’s home. By my calculations, this means that “Petite Maman” is less than half the length of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021), while being twenty times as good. The most welcome news of all is that the running time is seventy-two minutes. Adults are on the periphery the center of the film is occupied exclusively, and unforgettably, by children. There is no violence, unless you count a ball being hit with a paddle, and most definitely no sex. The tale is largely set in the tranquility of the French countryside. The answer is “Petite Maman,” which is rated PG, but only because somebody smokes a cigarette. Recently, Sciamma was one of the screenwriters of Jacques Audiard’s “ Paris, 13th District,” which measured the tremors of multiple modern desires. In the fall of 1939, for instance, admirers of Michael Curtiz, who had scored a hit with “Angels with Dirty Faces,” the previous year, were treated first to “Dodge City” and then, five months later, to “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.” (Both films starred Errol Flynn, who was, if anything, even more uneasy in a ruff and tights than he was in a ten-gallon hat.) One of the finest swervers of the present day is Céline Sciamma, who shifted from Black female gangs, in “ Girlhood” (2015), to an eighteenth-century painter and her subject, in “ Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019). Never be surprised by the swerves that mark the career of a movie director.