Directed by:
Céline SciammaScreenplay:
Céline SciammaCinematography:
Claire MathonComposer:
Jean-Baptiste de LaubierPlots(1)
Céline Sciamma’s follow-up to Portrait of a Lady on Fire transcends time and space to weave a delicately emotional fable about grief, family, and connection across generations. In the wake of her grandmother’s death, eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) accompanies her distraught mother (Nina Meurisse) to her childhood home. There, Nelly’s encounter with another young girl (Gabrielle Sanz) brings mother and daughter together in a way neither could have ever imagined. Evoking childhood’s perpetual state of wonder through luminous, richly textured images, Petite maman takes viewers on a journey inward for a quietly miraculous tale of emotional time travel. (Criterion)
(more)Reviews (3)
I remember Portrait of a Lady on Fire as tarted-up award bait that I gave three stars for the "craftsmanship" and never intended to return to, so I approached this one without any major expectations. But bugger me! I’m a moron. A beautiful, small and human film that doesn't want to be groundbreaking or engage with the big issues "that are burning us today", but evokes the purest of emotions in a simple fantasy romp. For some people, it won’t be anything special, but I got a thrill where I didn’t expect.
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An elegant and beautiful, but in some ways too much of a chic drama, and it’s hypnotic enough and lacks a more electrifying connection between reality and dream. It comes across as a cute vision without any real depth or profundity. In fact, it passed me by in a roundabout way, which I see as a disappointment from the author of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, although the film itself is certainly no disappointment.
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Petite maman is a very intimate, delicate and directorially solid affair whose screenplay comprises a not very sophisticated story on the subject of establishing intergenerational relationships with parents and grandparents, which lacks depth and a stronger emotional connection. The film is an endearing experiment on the ambiguously defined boundary between reality, dream and fantasy with a foundational concept that deserves a more complex and well-developed rendering.
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