Petite Maman

Directed by Celine Sciamma. 2021

In 2004, when I was 12, my family went to Lagos in Portugal on holiday. It was the summer of the Athens Olympics and the Euros in Portugal, won by Greece. At one point on that trip I left something in the apartment and had to rush back upstairs to get it, and hurrying down again ran straight into the glass door of the building. At another, we went fishing on a boat with some smoky Portuguese guys. I sat trailing my line over the side for ages until a roar went up among the fellas and I pulled out of the water a spikey orange fish. There was a hush and I reached out to touch it but then one of the fishermen jumped up shouting ‘NO! NO! THAT’S POISONOUS!’ At a dinner near the end of that holiday conversation turned to my dad’s beard. Me and my brother wanted him to shave it. None of the other dads at school had beards and I think we were a bit embarrassed. Mum watched vigilantly from behind her wine. Dad looked at us, reluctant. Eventually we convinced him and that night he went into the bathroom with a razor. When he came out he looked different, as you’d expect. But not good different. Not like himself. We didn’t like it and felt awkward.

Petite Maman by writer-director Celine Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Girlhood) tells the story of Nelly (Josephine Sanz), an 8-year-old accompanying her mum, Marion (Nina Meurisse), to her childhood home after the death of her own mother in care. Being there, in that little house backing onto the woods she played in as a child, becomes too much for Marion and she slides into a depression. When she goes back to the city early to collect herself Nelly is left with her dad (Stephane Varupenne) who will finish organising the grandmother’s things, and entertains herself by exploring the forest. There she meets another young girl (Gabrielle Sanz), curiously also named Marion, and who is constructing a hut from old tree branches just like the one Nelly’s mum built when she was small. With serenity and assurance Nelly understands the brief chink of magic that has delivered her mum to her there in a tiny form like hers – in those woods for just a few days – and embraces it with everything she has.

One evening after her mum has left, Nelly looks at her dad across the table and asks him to shave his beard. He does so and she, standing on the toilet in the bathroom, watches on with interest – as he finishes we hear the razor scraping his skin. Towelling away the last of the lather he turns to her for assessment, his smile bashful, bare, hopeful, and she studies him, we imagine with everything she’s known of him rushing through her mind. Then she says the perfect thing: ‘you’re handsome’. In the landscape of Petite Maman this is one of many profound moments on parents and children. One example of the many possible shapes those relationships can take (elsewhere parents are guardians, playmates, deserters). This one is a meeting of equals. A request proffered and taken seriously. An act of service met by gratitude and appreciation.

In 2017 my dad died of pancreatic cancer, and the thought I most often have about him is quite specific. Of course my body wants him back really deeply, but the particular yearning is to have him back now so that we could do adult things together. Watch films. Go to the pub. Share a curry. Know him more as Jack than dad. I was 25 in 2017 and regret that at that age I didn’t have the perspective to appreciate the present with him as much. Certainly not enough as to have done as many of those simple things as I wish. In Petite Maman, Nelly sees her mother slipping away – into the black hole of her own maternal grief which hovers over the narrative lending it immense stakes – but in the same breath is handed a chance to know her maybe more intimately than she ever would – as equals. One of the really interesting questions the film then poses is how to grasp that opportunity? And pushing that thought a little further down the road: in our lives, how do we make the time we get with the people we love meaningful?

Early on Nelly expresses regret to her mum about the last words she shared with her grandma. She said ‘au revoir’ but in an offhand way, without care. Like we all do all the time. Confident the moment will roll round again soon enough. Her mum asks what she would have liked to have said. Nelly thinks, then gives her a big cuddle, squeezing her tight around the waist, and says goodbye like she means it. While we’re absorbed by the love story unfolding between Nelly and young Marion – told in ordinary moments like the casual sharing of a technique for eating cereal, or hot chocolate drunk from bowls with spoons, or milk giddily overpoured into a pancake mix – that grandmother, Marion’s mum, is often in the background, or resting in the next room. Such a subtle presence that it was only when the time came for the girls to say goodbye – for Nelly to return to linear time – that I considered the opportunity arising for Nelly to say farewell to her again, but properly this time. Quickly our brains do the work of anticipating the big hug, the emphatic words. But now Nelly is hesitant. She no longer wants that it seems. Instead, she lets the grandma make the first move and reacts to it. Staying in the present. Feeling what there is to be felt in that moment. Not missing a thing. Something about the slow-time she has spent with young Marion – more about simply being together than using the gift they’ve been given for any extraordinary purpose – has shown her a different route to meaning.

In 2007 my mum was diagnosed with breast cancer, and happily in 2008 went into remission and has been cancer free ever since. It’s strange, and maybe a little shameful, but I’ve always organised that as the secondary cancer experience of my life. Probably because it had a good outcome. And because I was younger, 14 and 15, and my parents did a lot to preserve our routines. Recently I’ve been getting stuck thinking about it though. Asking myself how present I was for her during that time? How useful? And processing feelings of guilt. I spoke to her about it and she mentioned that my brother took it really hard. I don’t really remember that either... At the end of Petite Maman Nelly is heading back to her mum – like I will on Sunday afternoons after football or at Christmas – and with the film closing we imagine the change that rupture in the woods could inspire. This was already a loving bond – there’s a scene where Nelly feeds crisps to Marion from the backseat as she drives them on the motorway which is so wonderfully observed – but there was also pain – a chasm that Nelly couldn’t bridge. Might it help Marion to be seen by her daughter more as she is from now on? As Marion, not mum? And might Nelly gain something unique by being in love with her mind from that age, and not only the idea of her?

Sometimes I wrestle with how much art precipitates change. Not in the story – we know stories are most often built in arcs – even one as delicate as this can be framed as a cycle of learning and transformation – but I’m thinking about change in the viewer – something happening to the spectator in the experience that could be like a hinge. And not largescale political change either because that might be too grand an ambition, but small changes in the individual that can feel enormous. I suppose I’m talking about myself. I’m talking about the ways Petite Maman conjured images of my dad in my mind, and my mum in a headscarf, not wanting us to see her bald. My brother behind a door somewhere dealing with everything alone. And I’m talking about the energy with which Sciamma’s art charged those reflections so that I left the cinema with superb clarity about something that was difficult before. The kind of work that shows you a different route to meaning and makes you believe you can take it. There are so many depressing examples of that not happening, but I think it does here – emphatically.