From the lauded French auteur behind the unabashedly feminist modern classic “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” Céline Sciamma’s “Petite Maman” is a 72-minute time-travel fable that revels in the casually profound friendship between young Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) and her mother, Marion. In a magical turn of events, Nelly meets Marion not in her adult iteration, but as a girl (Gabrielle Sanz) her same age. Future parent and daughter learn about each other’s joys and preoccupations as perhaps they never could have in our linear reality.
The concept was born of a single image that came into Sciamma’s mind in 2017, that of two girls in front of a treehouse, and the question of what would happen if she met her own mother as a kid. Would they be sisters? Would they share the same mother?
“Our common history with our parents is childhood. That’s what we share,” she said from Paris during a recent video call. “We know about our parents’ childhood because we’re brought up in their rituals. But we don’t know about their bodies, their feelings, their fears. That’s what the characters in the film think about.”
