Two girls, both eight years old, have built a tree house in the forest. “I have to tell you a secret,” says Nelly, “you have to promise to believe me”. Marion gives Nelly her word, then the child explains to the child: Nelly is Marion’s daughter.
“Petite Maman” tells of a journey through time without a time machine. “Science fiction” would not even remotely fit the film, rather it is a magical realism with which Celine Sciamma (screenplay and direction) tells her haunting story in a quiet way. There are no leaps in time, only smooth transitions between Marion and Nelly’s reality, which merges into their common reality for a few days in autumn. In addition to the beautiful autumn pictures of the camerawoman Claire Mathon and the intense play of the twins Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz, it is the inconspicuous construction that makes the “Petite Maman” a silent event this strange Berlinale competition.
The scenes have fallen out of time, so to speak, which makes the story plausible: A forest area, adjacent to the old house of the recently deceased grandmother, in which time seems to have stood still. So if Nelly has met Marion between trees, she can return to the same rooms, but still go to a different time zone. In this way, Marion, who is the same age, can also get a foretaste of the future: What kind of music do you actually hear in 2020? Do you still celebrate children’s birthdays with candles on the cake?
The last “goodbye”
The story is really authenticated above all by the inner motivation of the main character: Nelly suffers from the fact that her mother Marion (as an adult: Nina Meurisse) is not there for her enough. The child feels responsible for the mother’s melancholy, at the same time Nelly wants to know more about Marion than she reveals about herself.
“Petite Maman” begins in the old people’s home where Nelly’s grandmother has just died. The girl says “Adieu” to the old ladies whom she will not see again. She cannot say goodbye to her grandma. That’s how it is when someone dies, says Nelly’s mother, the last “goodbye” was not an appropriate one. One thought yes, see each other again. At least Nelly can keep Grandma’s walking stick, on the handle of which the smell of her hand still hangs. Marion initially sits on her mother’s deathbed, her gaze lost in the autumn landscape in front of the window. Death initially silences the woman in her late thirties. Children grieve differently, they live their feelings, walk through them like through a forest, the film tells about that too.
After “Portrait of a Young Woman in Flames” (2019), the love story of a painter and her aristocratic model in the 18th century, Céline Sciamma has again achieved a great success with her fourth feature film “Petite Maman”. On the third day of the competition, in which the general public cannot take part for the time being, it would be too early to speculate about prices. Still, it would be a miracle if Sciamma’s elegy went completely empty.
Films that bring the past into the present
Grandmother, mother and daughter, the questions of the young and the silence of the older, plus two time levels that are a generation apart: This constellation can also be found in the remarkable competition entry “Memory Box” by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. Here you jump back in flashbacks – from today’s Montreal to Beirut in the 1980s, which disintegrates in the civil war. The “memory box” here is a box with old tape cassettes, exercise books and photos from Lebanon, a message from the young people from Beirut to their older selves.
A box with notebooks and photos, a walking stick that is almost hand-warm, a house on the edge of the forest full of old secrets, in general: Films that bring the past into the present (Dénes Nagy’s gloomy, laconic war drama “Natural Light” should be mentioned): What for gifts to the present!
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