PETITE MAMAN plays TIFF 2021

Two years ago, director Céline Sciamma painted a Romantic masterpiece with PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE. When such powerful work is unfurled, it’s fair to wonder where such a gifted artist could possibly take us next?

The answer, it seems if you are Sciamma, is to take your audience home. Home-home.

PETITE MAMAN begins with a death. We meet young Nelly soon after her grandmother has passed away in a long-term care facility; watching her say goodbye to her grandmother’s friends and neighbours while her parents clean out the grandmother’s room. From there, the film takes us to the family home in the countryside, where the settling of affairs will continue.

It’s here that Nelly makes a friend – Marion. The two become fast friends and find kinship during this delicate moment in Nelly’s life. They also share a connection that I dare not spoil.

The girls guide each other through precarious moments in both of their lives. They do this by being honest, being vulnerable, taking the situation in on their own terms (something that will get rarer and rarer as they age).

One of the things they don’t tell you growing up is that grief will show you a side of your parents you seldom get to see – if ever. These women and men who loom so large for your entire life are suddenly smaller in many ways. Occasionally, in grief, our parents can even seem as small as us. As adults, we can understand the change, but as children, it all seems so unexpected and curious.

With PETITE MAMAN, Sciamma wants us all to walk into the woods with our grief on our sleeves. She wants us to look at our parents and our children and see what they see when they look at us during these very personal moments. She wants us to see ourselves in the other – to embrace both the regression and the maturity.

Much of Céline Sciamma’s trademarks are here – watching from a distance, finding beauty in the everyday, creating and capturing safe spaces where women can open up. In a wildly economic 70 minutes, she allows every character time to open up to us and to Nelly. In these moments, we can’t help but see ourselves and our family members, perhaps seeing them fully for the first time.

This film is tender and intimate in ways so few of us will experience in our lives. It fixes us comfort food from our childhood, wraps us in the coziest sweater, and hums us a song we know well but never learned the name of. It is innocent and poetic, and stunning in its simplicity.