Petite maman: Au revoir l’enfance

For fans of Sciamma’s oeuvre, the secret closet signals an irresistible pun, queerness manifesting in cinematic and domestic architecture with a satisfying magnetic click that links Petite maman to her other films. Sciamma’s protagonists are dreamy searchers who often break out of isolation toward solidarity through “various physical activities,” as Katharina Lindner observes of Sciamma’s “girlhood” trilogy in her book Film Bodies. Petite maman, too, is exhilarating in its physicality, although its physical activities are less regimented and less populous than the synchronized swimming of Water Lilies, the summer social play of Tomboy, or the football, fighting, and dancing of Girlhood (2014).

Girlhood’s exhilarating central musical moment, the group-hug lip sync to Rihanna’s “Diamonds,” finds its counterpart in Petite maman as Marion follows Nelly on one last adventure before her surgery, sneaking out in the early morning to paddle a dinghy as the “music of the future” plays on the soundtrack, with a soaring electronic and choral backdrop by Para One, who has worked on all of Sciamma’s films, and lyrics by Sciamma. She has described the song as “an anthem for children,” and in the film it resounds over a landscape familiar from her youth in the Parisian suburb of Cergy-Pontoise (where Water Lilies was also filmed): Les Étangs de Cergy, a park featuring a leisure center that was completed the year before Sciamma was born. The area’s distinctive stepped pyramidal folly—one of the architectural features of the sprawling Axe Majeur, designed by Dani Karavan—also appears in films by Guillaume Brac and Eric Rohmer. Taking back the structure from films by cis men, Sciamma proceeds to send her young avatars inside this space of her own childhood, whose blue interior tiles, washed by watery reflections, hark back to the blue tiles in the grandmother’s bathroom, themselves echoing the distinctive blue wallpaper that appears behind Mickäel in Tomboy as he butches up in his white vest.

Emma Wilson’s monograph on Sciamma is subtitled Portraits. It’s a perceptive choice that captures Sciamma and Mathon’s use of still frames and frontality, their unhurried attention to faces and bodies expressing themselves indirectly. But Sciamma’s subjects do not sit still; they are not blank canvases. Like Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who uses the attention of the artist Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and/or the filmmaker, they insist on collaborating in shaping how they are seen. Petite maman echoes one of the most noted scenes in Sciamma’s filmography, in which Tomboy’s Mickäel shapes himself a plasticine packer in front of the mirror in order to maintain his masculine appearance to his crush Lisa (Jeanne Disson). In Petite maman, Nelly stands seriously in front of the mirror in Marion’s house, her hair brushed tightly back, a waistcoat over her collared shirt, trying to tie a tie. Sciamma, who was the film’s costumier, responded appreciatively at the Q&A in Vienna to an audience observation that Nelly presents as gender nonconforming compared with the femme Marion. Her untied tangle of fabric is another one of those naturalistic slips in the film that secures the time travel as a kind of child’s play: Why shouldn’t gender transition or reconnecting to our genealogy be that simple, that subject to our control and imagination?

But to achieve her look, Nelly needs help. She shyly asks her beloved grandmother (Margot Abascal) if she will tie her tie, which she does, affirming Nelly’s gender expression and showing her own physical competence. As a disabled caregiver, Marion’s mother shows the complexity of interdependence, the ways in which we all both give and need care. In contrast to the empty hospital bed that marks the grandmother’s absence in Nelly’s present, in the past we see her walking, parenting, cooking, and doing word puzzles. The cane that moves with her through her beloved house is one of the simple mechanisms that moves the film from time to time, and from generation to generation. “It still smells of her hand,” says Nelly, expressing concisely that the cane is a part of who her grandmother was and is.