We're not crying, you are crying!
Wondrous Petite Maman will break your heart in the best way possible
I don't usually cry at the end of time-travel movies. Sure, I get a little misty when Doc Brown says: “Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads!” And I shed tears during Kate & Leopold, but those were of pain and frustration.
Petite Maman, a short and simple fable from writer-director Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), turned me into a puddle with its final scene. Even days later, my voice would catch as I tried to describe its emotional heft.
It opens on a closing. Eightyear-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) is bidding farewell to the residents of a nursing home where her grandmother lived and, recently, died. Then her mom takes her back to grandma's house to clean out what was once her own childhood home.
For reasons never quite made clear, Mom then disappears, leaving Nelly and her dad to finish the job.
Nelly wanders in the woods behind the property and meets another girl named Marion, played by the actor's real-life twin, Gabrielle.
Put simply, Marion is Nelly's mother when she was a girl. Sciamma doesn't explain how or why this is. Nelly figures it out but doesn't ask further questions. She just accepts her new playmate, builds a tree fort with her and even goes to Marion's house, which is of course the same as her mom's old house, just newer and inhabited by her grandmother, younger and still alive. There's a strange form of nostalgia at play here.
As an adult, you might thrill to the notion of meeting your parents when they were your age. If they've died, you might be happy just to see them one more time at any age.
But for Nelly, too young to have long-ago memories, and still coming to terms with notions of time and mortality, this odd new experience merely IS.
And so the audience is simply pulled along with her on the journey.
The stakes are low. In Back to the Future, Marty McFly had to ensure his own existence.
In The Adam Project with Ryan Reynolds, the entire future is at stake.
Nelly and Marion make pancakes, and beg Nelly's dad to let them have a sleepover before they must part.
Sciamma, whose films often involve the tribulations of youth, takes the lightest of touches to this story, often just letting the camera watch the girls as they hang out together, playing with their food and chatting. Marion's one universe-rippling request is to hear “the music of the future” that Nelly is listening to through headphones.
At which point the sound design, previously concerned with the natural noises of the forest and the domestic creaks of the house, bursts into melodic life.
Turns out the music of the future sounds a bit like a lost track from Arcade Fire, and (not surprisingly), a little like the show-stopping a cappella number from Portrait of a Lady on Fire, another wondrous story from this talented French director.
It also sets up the film's conclusion. I won't spoil it except to say that it closes on an opening. I couldn't imagine a better ending.