Petite Maman resists the anti-child movement.
When M. Night Shyamalan was ballyhooed as “the new Spielberg,” only the media class fell for it, looking for a way to categorize what had been Spielberg’s success and popularity through the latest example of Hollywood box-office formula. It’s how the media always attempt to explain away the complexities and peculiarities of popular art. That’s why the French movie Petite Maman has gone unnoticed — kept from the public’s attention — even though filmmaker Céline Sciamma unexpectedly recaptures Spielberg’s once-amazing relation to childhood wonder and pure emotion.
Petite Maman is all the more remarkable because its playdate story of two little girls, Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) and Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), who explore a suburban wood and become friends through familiar rituals of child development, is also a meditation on aging, mortality, and sexuality. This is Sciamma’s take on that classic French-movie theme — the mystery of female sexuality that is also seen as the basis of motherhood.
At a time when Disney-Pixar busily multiracializes and sexually diversifies “family entertainment,” Sciamma simplifies her artistry to convey the essence of childhood discovery. Nelly and Marion resemble twins: Apple-cheek faces, thick bushes of auburn hair, and both wear slacks like that endearing tomboy photo of juvenile Sarah Cracknell on Saint Etienne’s album So Tough.
Sciamma mixes notions of pop femininity with the aura we recall from first reading “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Hansel and Gretel.” (Cinematographer Claire Mathon’s gentle, sensuous lighting matches White as Snow for the perfect balance of realistic wonder and fantasy astonishment.) A child’s internal search for a role model — such as Henry Thomas’s Elliott found in the alien E.T. — is what these girls see in each other, but Sciamma’s fairy tale is also a work of same-sex introspection.
Throughout Petite Maman’s perfectly brief 72-minute running time (a lesson all streaming-service filmmakers should heed), Nelly and Marion play existential Girl Scouts. Their mutual fondness is a matter of both rapport and identification, plus something innate. In their secluded world, Nelly’s father (Stéphane Varupenne), who does handy masculine things, is a kindly, remote figure, while her emotionally estranged mother (and Marion’s own disabled mother) suggest distanced warmth — a pre-menarche vision of impending womanhood. But there’s a particular sympathy in Petit Maman that can’t be overlooked and deserves appreciation.
In her previous film work (superb screenplays for the animated film My Life as a Zucchini, André Téchiné’s Being 17, and her debut feature Girlhood), Sciamma displayed a kinship with adolescence, femininity, and otherness. Her affectionate insight made those experiences sympathetic. Then, in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma turned pedantic-revisionist, making a “classical” lesbian love story that was also an exercise in feminist agony (including an odd ceremonial abortion sequence). Lady on Fire seemed aggressively confrontational — a fanatical outburst of Sciamma’s lesbian credentials. Now, in Petite Maman, Sciamma becalms that nightmarish rhetoric.
Petite Maman represents the most intellectualized yet emotionally pure example of queer adolescence since Terence Davies’s autobiographical The Long Day Closes. Its inquiry into the adult world is done quietly, expressively, close to the level of Albert Lamorisse’s virtually silent (because meditative) Red Balloon (1958), the greatest children’s film until Spielberg made E.T. It’s evident Sciamma realizes that contemporary adolescence is troubled by overly sophisticated attempts to move past innocence, yet Petit Maman insists on innocence — the things about adulthood that children cannot know.
Maybe Sciamma was denied “new Spielberg” coronation because mourning the loss of innocence in Petite Maman doesn’t fit the Pixar or M. Night Shyamalan formula. This profound, poetic sensitivity shames the obvious political correctness that ruins West Side Story Spielberg. Fact is, Sciamma’s child-parent empathy effectively links E.T. to A.I. She finds fascination in the emotional evolution of girlhood that is also universal childhood.
