Petite Maman
Oct. 9th, 2021 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerCeline Sciamma's Petite Maman is a story about a girl suffering from a recent loss in the family who finds solace and friendship when she meets another girl her own age... who turns out to live in her very same house, but a few decades earlier.
"Wait," I said. "I wrote that book."
This is a real life version of that old saw about how if you give ten writers the same prompt, they'll come up with ten different stories, because Petite Maman is very different from The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball (although the similarities did delight me).
Sciamma is best known at this point for Portrait of a Lady on Fire. This is a very different story, although there's a definite aesthetic and thematic similarity: it's a quiet, contained story, a small cast in a house in a beautiful natural setting, and although unlike Portrait of a Lady on Fire it does have one important male character (Nelly's father), the main focus is on the female characters.
Our heroine is Nelly, an eight-year-old girl who has just lost her maternal grandmother. Nelly and her parents go to clear out her grandmother's home. This was also Nelly's mother Marion's home in childhood, and she reminisces to Nelly about those days: the panther she used to imagine in the shadows at the end of her bed, the hut she built in the woods behind the house.
But Nelly's mother - presumably crushed by grief, although the movie doesn't explain - ends up leaving after just one night. Nelly's father takes over the packing, and Nelly heads out into the woods... where she finds a girl building a hut.
The synopsis I read didn't mention the magical angle, which puzzled me, because it's not really a spoiler: Nelly figures it out almost at once, when a rain storm swoops in and the girl takes Nelly to her house (which is of course Nelly's grandma's house) for hot chocolate.
This is a quiet story, understated in its emotion, with a gentle eye for the details of its setting: the autumn color in the woods, the house as a family home and in the process of being taken apart till it's just an empty house again ("They decorated around the bureau," Nelly's father discovers, when he moves a heavy piece of furniture in the kitchen). The program director compared the movie to the works of Miyazaki, which is accurate, although the comparison is not exact: there's a very different feel to it than to, say, My Neighbor Totoro, which is probably the closest comparison. The magic here is so matter-of-fact it almost doesn't feel like magic.
Nelly gives her mother spoilers, basically, for the next twenty-odd years of your life: you're going to have a daughter (me), and this is my father (ergo: the man you will marry), and your mother will die when you're thirty-one. I get why the movie can't go into the effect this has on Marion (it's very much focused on Nelly), but I do really wonder what it was like to go forward with all this foreknowledge about her own life!
"Wait," I said. "I wrote that book."
This is a real life version of that old saw about how if you give ten writers the same prompt, they'll come up with ten different stories, because Petite Maman is very different from The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball (although the similarities did delight me).
Sciamma is best known at this point for Portrait of a Lady on Fire. This is a very different story, although there's a definite aesthetic and thematic similarity: it's a quiet, contained story, a small cast in a house in a beautiful natural setting, and although unlike Portrait of a Lady on Fire it does have one important male character (Nelly's father), the main focus is on the female characters.
Our heroine is Nelly, an eight-year-old girl who has just lost her maternal grandmother. Nelly and her parents go to clear out her grandmother's home. This was also Nelly's mother Marion's home in childhood, and she reminisces to Nelly about those days: the panther she used to imagine in the shadows at the end of her bed, the hut she built in the woods behind the house.
But Nelly's mother - presumably crushed by grief, although the movie doesn't explain - ends up leaving after just one night. Nelly's father takes over the packing, and Nelly heads out into the woods... where she finds a girl building a hut.
The synopsis I read didn't mention the magical angle, which puzzled me, because it's not really a spoiler: Nelly figures it out almost at once, when a rain storm swoops in and the girl takes Nelly to her house (which is of course Nelly's grandma's house) for hot chocolate.
This is a quiet story, understated in its emotion, with a gentle eye for the details of its setting: the autumn color in the woods, the house as a family home and in the process of being taken apart till it's just an empty house again ("They decorated around the bureau," Nelly's father discovers, when he moves a heavy piece of furniture in the kitchen). The program director compared the movie to the works of Miyazaki, which is accurate, although the comparison is not exact: there's a very different feel to it than to, say, My Neighbor Totoro, which is probably the closest comparison. The magic here is so matter-of-fact it almost doesn't feel like magic.
Nelly gives her mother spoilers, basically, for the next twenty-odd years of your life: you're going to have a daughter (me), and this is my father (ergo: the man you will marry), and your mother will die when you're thirty-one. I get why the movie can't go into the effect this has on Marion (it's very much focused on Nelly), but I do really wonder what it was like to go forward with all this foreknowledge about her own life!
