PETITE MAMAN AT THE FILM FESTIVAL
A moving look at childhood and loss
.Petite Maman is about childhood, friendship and loss. Céline Sciamma renowned French film director brings a carefully balanced simplicity to this story .We watch eight year old Nelly saying ‘au revoir’ to residents in a Care Home until she reaches an empty room. She regrets not having said goodbye to her own Granny “ I didn’t know” she says sadly.. Her mother is tense and heartbroken and Nelly notices the unexplained worrisome atmosphere between her parents. Something isn’t right. Stéphane Varupenne plays a pleasant tolerant father detached from events
“ He doesn’t listen’ his daughter explains. Yet the scene when he shaves off his beard to please her - she lathers his face - is a lovely moment. He gazes at his newly revealed face with a mixture of fear and alarm. When Nelly asks him at bedtime to tell her one of his childhood fears, his whispered response is an unwelcome surprise. More secrets, more concealment. The family then goes off to pack up the grandmother’s slightly spooky house in the woods, where a melancholic mother gets to look over her childhood books and games.
When she unexpectedly leaves, Nelly meets a little girl her own age playing in the woodland den her mother used to love. They become friends but it’s not long before Nelly realises her new playmate is someone out of the ordinary. She makes her new friend Marion, promise to believe her when she tells her thoughts.
Both children become closer. Yet as the two friends discuss their dreams of becoming actors, and play out a very funny pretend drama they’ve made up ( it features a huge oversized baby doll ), more meaning unfolds. The film is about adults’ lives, their secrets and the puzzling life children lead with so few true insights into their parents’ past. The children s tender friendship develops. The joyful scenes of them making pancakes together is just so delightful as are their excursions on to the nearby lake in a canoe on a voyage of exploration.
They know it must come to an end but stay close until that moment comes. There’s a birthday party, they stage their private play, the mysterious canoe trip, all in the bleak lonely setting of a neglected house with an absent mourning mother, her private thoughts always unspoken- until the very last wonderful moment of the film.
The entire production manages, miraculously, to avoid sentiment. The children’s acceptance of their reality muffles the sharp poignancy of loss and they discuss death in the direct way children do.
“Did you love her?” Marion asks Nelly of her grandmother
.” Énormement, so much’ she replies.
It ends beautifully and it is a film to remember.
Sisters act in Petite Maman
