This is the kind of movie where every film I’ll compare it too I like a lot more, but the fact that this is the company it keeps speaks volumes about it. There’s the parental connection and temporal paradox of About Time. It’s got the touch of the supernatural and childhood perspective of Where the Wild Things Are. It’s small and meditative like A Ghost Story. It’s a charming movie through and through, although its scale makes it easy to misidentify as being a slight movie.
The idea of Petite Maman is that Nelly (Josephine Sanz) is an eight-year-old girl who just lost her grandmother, who she was very close to. Her parents bring her to her grandmother’s house in the country as they pack it up. Her mother is overwhelmed by the loss and disappears for a few days. While playing outside on her own, Nelly runs into a little girl in the woods who turns out to be her mother as an 8-year-old. The two become friends until it’s clear that this temporal portal must close.
What works so well for the movie is that it doesn’t overload this with plot. Nelly figures out what is happening right away and rolls with it, because frankly, meeting your mother as a child in the woods is no stranger than most things seem to an 8-year-old. When her child mother, Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), does find out, it’s also not a big deal. This film is a really pure depiction of friendship with the added layer of the relation of the two girls. The parental and generational metaphor is on the nose, but the movie isn’t trying to outsmart the audience with it. It knows the audience will figure things out right away and brushes right by that.
The casting is key to this movie. Based on the shared last name, I’ll assume the two stars are sisters, perhaps even fraternal twins, and that makes up for a lot that can make child performances feel artificial. Nothing about their relationship feels forced, which speaks to the touching mother-daughter connection as much as the simple nature of friendships when you are that young. To even talk to a new person now, I need to vet them 20-different ways to make sure it’ll be worth the effort. When I was eight though, I’d make a friend because we had the same-colored lunch bag.
I can already feel this movie growing on me. It’s so short and sweet that I’m all but guaranteed to rewatch it at some point. It revels in the small and still moments in a way that’s very European. That’s not always a good thing. Sometimes it can feel like a filmmaker is purposely avoiding the trappings of a more produced studio movie. For Petite Maman it works, because it’s a whisp of a movie. Everything about it is designed to make you come away like you just imagined it. The short length. The unexplored phenomenon of it. Even the end is a bit of a mystery. I left this movie in a haze, like I’d been walking around a movie theater and found myself watching this without remembering sitting down.
Verdict: Strongly Recommend
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