Meanwhile, Nelly has the beautiful autumnal woods to play in. One day, she goes out and meets another girl her own age who takes her to the fort she is building with fallen branches. When it starts to rain too much for fun, Marion, the new girl, takes Nelly back to her place. At first, it's fun but it's odd. Finally it lands as Nelly realises that Marion's house is identical to her grandmother's. Freaked, she begs off. Intrigued, she promises to come back and play some more. She has just met her own mother as a girl.
But has she? She has been listening to stories of her mother's childhood in that area. Her mother has also departed, feeling the weight of her grief and the memories of the location. Her father remains but affably bats back Nelly's requests for old family stories. Nelly falls back on a wealth of child imagination. It might well be that Marion is a desperate hallucination. But even that gets stressed.
Petite Maman is the latest feature film by Celine Siamma whose mind and talent brought us Portrait of a Lady on Fire (and a few others I need to see). This means that the almost Dardenne Brothers plainness of the opening scenes was almost inevitably going to be stirred by some serious invention. That's what dependably happens here. The really impressive thing is that Siamma maintains the kitchen sink flatness of the presentation even as the narrative travels down paths whimsical and worrying.
Apart from one scene there isn't even a score. We are seeing something like the origin episode of a bedtime story where, like the best of them, we must ourselves do much to fill in what's happening. Siamma's expert hand at detail is essential here. In an early scene, Nelly is playfully eating a crunchy snack by rapidly crunching her teeth into it as she pushes it into her mouth, the way you might feed a log into a woodchipper. Later in the same scene we see her mother, driving, from the side, get fed the same snacks from behind as Nelly's tiny disembodied hands reach for her mother's mouth. We know that Nelly is playful, imaginative and can charm her mother with found materials. From there it's not such a long journey to her conjuring her own mother as a playmate in the enchanting woods.
There is a lot of plot that I won't reveal as it carries the weightier themes of the film and needs seeing the film to appreciate. However, I will say that the sense that I was being gently lowered into some profundities about parent/child relationships with both the darker concerns of the former and the unbridled invention of the latter. I can't end until I also appreciate the performances of real life twins Josephing and Gabrielle Sanz in the central roles: they are as intense and free-minded as real children and remind us who have minds like old desk calendars that Nietzsche lamented how we forget the seriousness of child's play.
I mentioned the lack of music, didn't I/ Well, I did say almost. Towards the end, one of the final acts of friendship between the girls happens on a lake with a rowboat and an extraordinary structure. The song begins like a throwback to great British synth pop but soon blooms into a choral and electronic piece that conveys so much joy that it needled at my tearducts. If you see it at the cinema, you get this music again (with a sly lyric runner on the lower left screen). Please sit all the way through it. No, funny outtakes or teasers, just a piece of music you will need to properly digest this strange and eerie feast.
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