Petite Maman
2021 · Céline Sciamma
After the death of her beloved grandmother, eight-year-old Nelly meets a strangely familiar girl her own age in the woods. Instantly forming a connection with this mysterious new friend, Nelly embarks on a fantastical journey of discovery which helps her come to terms with this newfound loss.
dir. Céline Sciamma · 2021
After the sweeping romanticism of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma pared her cinema down to seventy-two minutes and the eye level of an eight-year-old. A girl mourning her grandmother, a house being emptied, a wood behind it where a strangely familiar playmate appears: from these spare elements Sciamma builds a fable about grief, time, and the impossible wish to have known one's mother as a child. Shot in autumn 2020 under pandemic constraints, the film turns limitation into concentration — a handful of rooms, two seasons of light caught by cinematographer Claire Mathon, and the remarkable Sanz twins, Joséphine and Gabrielle, whose real-life resemblance does quiet metaphysical work no effect could match. Sciamma, the great contemporary chronicler of French girlhood from Water Lilies through Tomboy, treats the fantastic with total matter-of-factness; there is no shimmer, no threshold, just a child accepting wonder the way children do. The result plays like a Miyazaki film made in live action, or a ghost story told entirely in daylight. Its final effect is out of all proportion to its size — a whole theory of family compressed into a game of make-believe in the woods.
Lines of influence
- Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) — Same Sciamma–Claire Mathon partnership: available-light, painterly compositions built on held two-shots and long silences, where an emotional charge is carried by faces at rest rather than dialogue.
- Tomboy (2011) — Sciamma's earlier practice of pinning the camera to a child's exact eye-height and directing a non-professional child lead to naturalistic stillness, letting girlhood identity play out through small gestures.
- Water Lilies (2007) — Sciamma's debut establishes her minimalist adolescent-desire register — sparse settings, unadorned framing, and adolescent interiority observed without adult voice-over or explanation.
- My Neighbor Totoro (1988) — The explicit Miyazaki debt: two young sisters, a mother convalescing away from home, and forest spirits presented matter-of-factly and without menace, so the fantastic reads as consolation rather than threat.
- The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) — Child-eye framing inside a hushed, near-empty domestic space where the fantastic is filtered entirely through a grave little girl's solemn attention and long silences.
- Ponette (1996) — Sustained naturalistic direction of a very young child working through a mother's death, camera lowered to her height and patient enough to let real childlike logic about the dead surface on screen.
- Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) — Playful, matter-of-fact slippage between women into a haunted house that replays another time, treating a temporal/ghostly membrane as a game rather than a horror device.
- Where Is the Friend's House? (1987) — A child's simple, self-contained quest filmed with unadorned realism at his level, trusting a small domestic mission to carry the film's entire emotional weight.
- La Jetée (1962) — Memory rendered as an involuntary return to a specific place and beloved person across time, achieved through radical elliptical compression rather than exposition.
- The Double Life of Véronique (1991) — The uncanny doubling of a single performer across two lives, with an unexplained emotional connection passing between them treated as felt fact, not puzzle to be solved.
- Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) — The dead return and quietly join the living at the table with no fright and no explanation — the same matter-of-fact-fantastic staging where ghosts are ordinary household presences.
- A Ghost Story (2017) — Grief and time collapsed through a deadpan, matter-of-fact ghost, rendered in patient minimalist long takes that make loss spatial and quiet rather than dramatic.
- Aftersun (2022) — Grief reconstructed as memory of a parent through elliptical compression and restraint, withholding the explanatory scene and letting an accumulation of small observed moments do the mourning.
- The Quiet Girl (2022) — A watchful child in a hushed, minimalist farmhouse, near-wordless, with withheld emotion and child-eye framing carrying a story of surrogate parenthood and loss.
- Playground (Un monde) (2021) — The camera locked rigorously at child eye-level for the entire film, so the adult world exists only as legs and fragments and the child's-scale perspective becomes the formal system.
- Close (2022) — Contemporary European childhood-and-grief cinema in the Sciamma mode: naturalistic child leads, restrained handling of a bereavement, and emotion staged through proximity and silence rather than speech.
Appears in courses