Nelly has just lost her grandmother and is helping her parents clean out her mother’s childhood home. She explores the house and the surrounding woods. One day she meets a girl her same age building a treehouse.
When we are children, shadows take form of wondrous creatures, lurking by, waiting until we go to sleep. When we grow up, upon reflection, those shadows were just shadows, our young minds playing tricks on us. Writer-director Céline Sciamma’s scintillating coming-of-age drama, “Petite Maman,” centers on that moment when the adult world comes encroaching, when fairy tales and mysteries, while still vibrant, begin to morph with reality. It pulls you into its alluring, quiet, bordering-on-magical world – and then, just like childhood, it’s over before we know it.
Eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) just lost her grandmother. While Mom (Nina Meurisse) cleans out her childhood home, Nelly ventures into the woods surrounding the house. There, in the autumn-hued shrubbery, she meets Marion (played by Joséphine’s twin sister Gabrielle), who’s busy building a hut – just like Nelly’s mother did when she was a child. Next thing, Mom is gone without revealing why (but Nelly has her theories), and the young girl finds herself alone with Dad (Stéphane Varupenne), and Marion.
Like Nelly, Marion has no friends. The girls look identical. The bond they form is quick and deep – they come up with an elaborate murder mystery, bake pancakes, have sleepovers, work on the hut. Is Marion real? Or a reflection of Nelly, an embodiment of her future memories? “I come from the path behind you,” one of the girls tells the other enigmatically, after revealing a mind-bending secret.
At 72 minutes, Sciamma’s tender, beguiling film speaks volumes. It’s about the first friendship, perhaps the deepest one. It’s about potential loss and fear of the unknown. It’s about the fleeting nature of childhood – boundless and eternal while it lasts, then over in a wink, the rest of life compressed into increasingly grueling years, wherein we cast a pragmatic/retrospective glance at our formative years. It’s about secrets, and whether we keep them because we don’t want to disclose something, or because we have no one to disclose them to.
With nary a musical cue or visual embellishment, “Petite Maman” trusts its impeccable young leads to propel the minimalist story forward. Subtlety is key here. The film opens with Nelly saying goodbye to the inhabitants of an elderly home, prior to asking her mom if she can keep her grandmother’s walking stick (“It smells like her hand,” she later states). “Yes,” her mother replies absently, then looks out of the window quietly. These goodbyes are later put into context. Nelly feeding her mother chips and apple juice as they drive through the countryside is a wonderful moment, so real it hurts – as is the sequence of the two young heroines escaping the rain.
Sciamma has proven herself a filmmaker deeply in touch with the pleasures, mysteries, and poignancy of youth. Her films – from “My Life as a Zucchini” to “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” to AFI Fest’s other entry this year, “Paris, 13th District” (which she co-wrote), all bask in the joy and sadness of adolescence. Profound and endearing, “Petite Maman” may just mark Sciamma’s best film yet.
“Petite Maman” screened at the AFI Fest on Saturday, November 13th
