After the passing of her grandmother, a young girl, Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), assists her parents in cleaning out the matriarch’s old home.  Full of grief, Nelly’s mother (Nina Meurisse) leaves her childhood home to be packed up by her husband (Stéphane Varupenne).  Nelly grows bored in packing up the house and goes outside to play in the same woods her mother did as a child.  There, she meets a young girl her age, Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), and the two become fast friends over their brief time together. 

Petite Maman is a breezy 73-minute film written and directed by Céline Sciamma released in the USA by Neon.  The French director is no stranger to telling stories about children at turning points on the screen.  Her breakout feature, Water Lillies (2007) interrogates a budding love triangle between adolescents on a swim team, the first time in their lives they are feeling this type of love, or rather, desire.  Later, with Tomboy (2011), Sciamma creates an intimate character study of a young girl who is beginning to realize and embrace her identity as a boy.  Even with Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), while the main story revolves around two grown women, there is a very present secondary plot revolving around the young servant, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), who is contending with an unwanted pregnancy.  Petite Maman serves as an intimate look and the innocence of childhood rocked by the loss of a loved one, and even more so seeing how that loss affects one’s parents who, until that point, are typically seen as impenetrable forces. 

Sciamma, as with her previous work, shows that she has a way with children as she coaxes the Sanz sisters into delivering truly captivating and intriguing performances.  Nelly is the center of this film, but that is not to say that Marion gets to sit back and play second fiddle.  Both girls seem to be totally in tune with the story and with each other, and further with who their characters actually are, which is key to unlocking and staying with this quaint, modern fairytale.  Petite Maman is also Sciamma at her most playful as she fully embraces the magical realism in even the most simple aspects of the film.  She fully unlocks the power of imagination as we see the girls build a small fort in what appears to be a massive and unending forest, or as they play dress up and put on their own little play which they wrote, direct, and star.    

Petite Maman is a truly special film and it shines in its simplicity.  Sciamma pours her heart and soul into this narrative, and it does what all good films – good stories – do; speak to us on a human level.  While it feels like a very personal film for the writer/director who is using her art as an outlet, the themes are universal, and it is very easy to get caught up in the magic of the film.  It stands apart from the rest of her body of work, veering much younger than even Tomboy, but it is not dissimilar to her previous films.  By stripping the story back to this core element, Sciamma is able to bring a concentrated vision of the special friendship shared between a mother and daughter to the forefront in a way that is uniquely inventive and totally on-brand for her stories about the female experience.