Film Review: A Child’s Quest To Fathom Her Mother’s Grief

It is no secret that films find it easy to imagine women as mothers — if not a mother, there is possible motherhood lurking as a catastrophic event (Shakun Batra’s ‘Gehraiyaan’ falls into the same trap). And yet, for all this overrepresentation across different contexts and industries, motherhood has hardly been explored beyond clichés. Like all clichés, the trouble is not its subject, but how it is looked at. Recent films like Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut ‘The Lost Daughter’ and Céline Sciamma ‘Petite Maman’ — both made by filmmakers experimenting with the female gaze — make this gap strikingly clear. Cinema, it seems, is beginning to get interested in exploring motherhood beyond sacrifice and trauma.

Before the French filmmaker made a splash with her 2019 masterpiece, ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire,’ a gripping study of power and passion set in the 18th century, she caught our attention with her stylistic, coming-of-age trilogy:  ‘Water Lilies’, ‘Tomboy’, and ‘Girlhood’.

Sciamma’s fifth feature film, ‘Petite Maman (Little Mama),’ currently streaming on MUBI, has a refreshing premise — in an attempt to understand her parent’s adult sadness, eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) imagines her mother (Nina Meurisse) as her equal. This is an act of profound empathy, even as it is a desire for intimacy: A demonstration of love as paying attention — something that Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017), another film on mothers and daughters, had also reminded us. “I am a child, I will understand,” Nelly says somewhere at the beginning of the film. She does. She could have been bitter or angry at her mother’s distance. Instead, she is curious. 

Parallel to Nelly’s preoccupation with her mother’s childhood and wanting to know everything about what she may have felt or desired, is her father’s forgetfulness. Comments are made about his inability to listen; his childhood fear of his own father is only cajoled out of him by Nelly’s questions and even then just whispered in one tiny moment. In her universe, there is nothing worse than not paying attention. 
Sciamma commented in an interview about the film’s preoccupation with “watching little girls eat cereal”. It is a lovely observation because much of the film evokes the child’s world through daily acts — eating cereal, brushing teeth, boiling milk, even the gesture of drying your hair after getting soaked in the rain. Small things that make up the big business of living in the world. Nelly does these things with attention, and the camera is there to observe as she makes the world her own. The film’s ability to be this minimal (it was shot during the lockdown) is moving. It is eloquent without needing the trappings of plot action. 

But perhaps the film’s most moving quality is its own act of imagination and empathy —   its effort to understand (and not judge) the people who could possibly hurt us or leave us. Plotwise, Nelly’s fantasy helps her say goodbye to her grandmother find reassurance about her own place in her mother’s life. In the process, the film reveals what we may already know — childhood is a shared experience. We forgive our parents as much as they forgive us. Perhaps we bring them up as much as they do that for us. When Nelly meets a young girl, Marion (played by Gabrielle Sanz, Josephine’s real-life twin), in the grove of autumn trees near her Grandma’s mysterious house, she finds in her shades of her mother’s childhood because Marion’s life resembles the tales she has been told of her mother.

In contrast to the profound meditation on motherhood in ‘The Lost Daughter,’ where the children are literally shown as an interruption in the mother’s life, ‘Petite Maman’ reimagines the mother-child relationship as generative. They both navigate the inherently unfair business of an adult being responsible for a dependent child, even as the adult struggles with memories of their own childhood. The child may not have invented her mother’s sadness, as its dialogue says, but the child did invent the mother — she would not exist without her. What if we saw that experience as a shared burden, shared responsibility and maybe, shared joy? It is a film that Sciamma wanted to make for both adults and children, after all.

And so at the film’s beginning, Nelly and Nina, daughter and mother, are already almost-equals as Nelly feeds her chips and juice on the way back from the hospital where her grandmother has died. Marion smiles at the reassurance; Nelly has her back. It is the same smile we will see again at the end of the film. They will bring each other up.

Aakshi Magazine has a PhD in film studies and works as a teacher.