9/4/2023 0 Comments Sonic youth superstar meme![]() ![]() When you watch Petite Maman, you’ll feel like a child again. Perhaps they both just look like full people. Nelly, a bit like an adult, and Marion, a bit like a kid. Though here they are different in age unlike the rest of the movie, they look remarkably similar. When Nelly and her present day mother meet again in the last scene of the movie, they sit cross legged on the floor together. Perhaps actors should make believe a bit more. And because of it, their acting was some of the best I’ve seen in a long time. Actresses Gabrielle Sanz and Josephine Sanz (Marion and Nelly) have an earnestness and ease that comes with incredible imagination. When you watch children play pretend they are simply in the world as opposed to an actor, acting as though they are in the world. I kept thinking about the crossover between acting and make-believe. There is space for both.Įven the acting mirrors this sentiment. We watch the two girls make pancakes and draw flour mustaches on each other’s faces and we also hear young Marion tell Nelly with utter sincerity “you didn’t invent my sadness”. Instead of a child growing into something bigger and better, she invites us to see that maybe children are the most disinhibited yet deep we can be. These qualities are not mutually exclusive in Sciamma’s world of youth unlike many others. Petite Maman portrays child logic better than any media I’ve seen–with an abundance of depth and intelligence interwoven with belief in magic. At least until Nelly has to go home with her father and present day mother. ![]() The two become close friends and spend a great deal of time together. It is the same house Nelly came from, however, this house is filled with life, as well as her grandmother. The two head to Marion’s house, down a different path than Nelly came from. The two girls play and we quickly learn that Marion is Nelly’s mother–when she was Nelly’s age. When she is out in the woods one day, she comes across a fort made of sticks and a young girl who looks remarkably like herself, introduced as Marion. Nelly plays in the woods around the house, where her mother used to play. The movie, in French, is about a young girl named Nelly who is cleaning out her late grandmother’s house with her parents. As the lead in the movie says to her father and perhaps more broadly to the adult ear, “you don’t forget, you just don’t listen.” You have to lean in, kneel down, and listen closely: a whisper from a child’s lips. Like a poem, Petite Maman’s silence is as meaningful as its words. Like a poem, the movie is quite short –at just seventy two minutes– and quiet, with only one song in the whole movie (a trademark of Céline Sciamma think Portrait of a Lady on Fire). Isabelle Edgar, Intern: I had never seen a movie that felt so much like a poem until I saw Petite Maman (2022), directed by Céline Sciamma. ![]()
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