In 2019, when Céline Sciamma made Portrait of a Lady on Fireit strikes a huge blow. A flagship film of what can embody the ” female gaze “, an unforgettable feminist and free love film, it was remembered as a milestone. But for the filmmaker the real challenge then began: what to tell next?
In 2021, she answered this question with intelligence and finesse by almost taking the opposite view of her previous work (almost, because she fortunately does not lose sight of what makes her work so special: her original and unique exploration of the female condition).
Far from the epic and carnal historical fresco, in Petite maman she focuses her gaze on a house lost in the woods and on a little girl, Nelly, eight years old, whose grandmother has just died.
But as the family empties out their grandmother’s house, Nelly’s mother disappears. And Nelly, in the nearby woods, meets a little girl her age who is building a cabin. Who is she? A ghost? Her own mother as a child?
To confuse the issue even more, the filmmaker entrusted the interpretation of these two little girls to two sisters (Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz)…
Cultivating mystery through a sense of purity with a captivating sweetness, Céline Sciamma then charges these games of little girls with meaning and depth with great tenderness, but also manages to maintain a rather fascinating blur between two realities
temporal. The time of mourning, the time of the forest… and in the middle, a space, perhaps, where we can come to terms with mourning and disappearance by inventing the one who has left.
Moving and rigorous, sensitive and restrained, Little momset during a bright autumn, was conceived, according to the director’s admissions, by asking herself one main question: “What would Miyazaki do?”
If the reference to the Japanese master of animation is of course more than commendable, it is, moreover, what breathes into this film a poetry that is sometimes strange, always captivating, and gives it what is probably its primary quality: that of treating the emotions of children as equal to those of adults. We thank him for it.
The trailer (source: YouTube)
