Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021) (Patreon)

Lest we forget, Céline Sciamma is a prolific screenwriter, and aside from her own five features she has written scripts for films that, in their surface, appear quite different from her own films. One of them, Being 17, was directed by the great André Téchiné, and I think one can strongly sense Téchiné's influence on Petite Maman. A small, relatively quiet story about family in transition, Sciamma's latest is as muted as Portrait of a Lady on Fire was brash and innervated. A young girl, Nelly (Jósephine Sanz) has just lost her grandmother. We know the two were close. While Nelly's mother (Nina Meurisse) and father (Stéphane Varupenne) are clearing the grandmother's things out of her room, Nelly goes door to door, saying goodbye to the other women on her grandmother's wing of the assisted care facility. 

In fact, Nelly is consistently more adept at social niceties, emotional intuition, and rational thought than her mother. Despite its lyrical realism, situated in emptied domestic spaces and a forest clearing that cradles the grandmother's old home with radiant autumnal foliage, Petite Maman bears traces of otherworldly abstraction, and Nelly's verbal precocity is the first clue that Sciamma is up to something unexpected.

Like such Téchiné films as Wild Reeds and My Favorite Season, Petite Maman explores human emotion through subtle gestures and seemingly insignificant interactions. Nelly feeds Cheetos to her mom as she drives, and she plays a board game with her new friend from next door (Gabrielle Sanz) with a look poised somewhere between close attention and mental drift. Usually films falter when they place so much responsibility on young actors, especially if they're asked to behave like mini-adults. But Sanz's Nelly is the exception. Her terse, businesslike demeanor tells us that she has been shouldering the burden of raising herself, and keeping her family on track, for a long time.

After her mom leaves suddenly, Nelly and her father strike a tense but clearly ordinary posture toward one another. They are silently reassuring one another that she will come back, in her time. And this is the point at which Sciamma begins carving Petite Maman into something light years beyond another story of family dysfunction. She has placed Nelly in an unenviable position, but the second half of Petite Maman is about using the power of imagination, and cinema, to reward Nelly for her service to her world. She gets a chance at healing and insight that no troubled child ever receives, and although her objective circumstances may not change all that much, she is gifted with an awareness that everything will be all right.

To say more would be unconscionable. But I will say this. The success of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, with its grand sweep and aching romanticism, has clearly given Sciamma the courage to scale down and pinpoint the experience of a bright little girl with the skill of a great oil painter. Just a beautiful, wise film.