Petite Maman

Following Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Celine Sciamma decided to dial back the scale, creating a delicate and beautiful portrait of a mother and daughter, gleaming into the eyes and mind of a young girl to not just explore the imagination and magic of youth but to deconstruct how children see their parents and how trauma passes down from one generation to the next.

Weirdly compelling and unique

So simple yet so effective and moving. A beautiful film.

Petite Maman is a movie about a girl (Nelly) who has just lost her grandmother and is helping her parents clean out her mother's childhood home. She explores the house and the surrounding woods. One day she meets a girl (Marion) her same age building a treehouse. They become friends and have all sorts of adventures together. As their relationship develops, Nelly realises that Marion is actually her mother who has travelled from the past to be with her. This is a surprise to both of them and themes of family, loss, and friendship are explored as they play together. The two actors playing the children are twins in real life and they have great chemistry together. They are both very natural and believable in their roles. Their dialogue often feels improvised and their scenes together are some of the best in the movie. The element of time travel is so subtle it's almost unnoticeable. There are no special effects, no flashy sequences; just a few small, everyday things that seem out of place. This makes the story more believable and allows the focus to remain on the relationship between Nelly and Marion. My biggest problem with the movie is the pacing. It's a bit slow and meandering in the first half, which made it hard for me to stay interested. However, the second half is much better and the last few scenes are particularly emotional and powerful. Overall, Petite Maman is a moving and thought-provoking film with great performances from its two young leads.

Petite Maman is a spellbinding film. An enchanting film with a deep emotional base about grief and childhood. About the bonds of family and friends. In its brief running time (72 minutes) it conveys much that most bigger films can rarely attain. Director Celine Sciamma has an innate ability to display the full gamut of human emotions in her films. This film starts with 8YO Nelly who has just lost her grandmother. WIth her mother and father they retreat to her mother's childhood home wherethe memories live on strongly. They are too strong for Nelly's mother who leaves abruptly during the night. The next day Nelly ventures into the woods where she meets another little girl who looks just like her. They go back to her house and begin bonding over playing together and even baking pancakes. Without giving anything away the film ventures into fantasy of sorts. But it truly works. It's an insightful film, especially in showing how the two young girls see the world and their lives and families. It's gentle and deeply emotional, just a joy to watch. A film like this is small in narrative scope but deeply impactful. It's hopeful but also sad. A film of many small moments that will take your breath away.

Very enchanting film! The two lead child actresses were so cute and funny. It was very wholesome and heartfelt. We need more stories like this.

one of my favorite movies — an incredibly tender portrait of grief

Talk about a cure for insomnia! Director Celine Sciamma's latest offering in the female bonding genre is so understated, underdeveloped, underexplained and underwhelming that it amounts to little more than a flat-out bore, even at a scant runtime of 1:13:00. In this story of grief and loss, viewers find a sensitive eight-year-old suddenly in the company of a mysterious peer who seems uncannily familiar -- and whose identity is easy to figure out without the needlessly long, stretched out, inconsequential relationship that develops between them. And, once the big reveal is made, the story doesn't get any more interesting from there, with the duo engaging in all manner of everyday pedestrian activities that are played for being more significant and profound than they truly are. How this navel-contemplating exercise in minimalist subtlety managed to amass such critical acclaim is genuinely beyond me. However, if you can somehow manage to stay awake for this sleeper (and not in the good sense of the word), congratulations -- you deserve a medal for successfully sticking out this pretentious, self-important snooze fest.

this is not an adult movie about a kid, this is a kids' movie about a kid... the difference is everything. A movie like The 400 Blows is a movie about a kid's life, but made for an adult audience. This movie was made from the perspective of a child and for a child to watch. Totally boring, nothing happens for nearly the entire movie, and in the end it all amounts to a subpar, anticlimactic failure. Nothing even close to the powerful story she last told. Don't waste your time. Read a good book instead.

Beautiful, tender examination of what it means to love, grieve, and to find connection.