No./18 What Céline Sciamma did next
How do you follow up a simmering masterpiece like Portrait Of A Lady On Fire? Make a unique fantasy that’s essentially a two-hander for eight-year-olds, apparently
A SUMPTUOUS, Slow-burn queer romance set in 18th-century France, Portrait Of A Lady On Fire was one of last year’s best. With a host of glowing reviews under its belt plus a prize from Cannes for Best Screenplay, all eyes were on what filmmaker Céline Sciamma would conjure up next. It may be surprising to most, then, that her follow-up is Petite Maman: a pared-down, coming-of-age fantasy about an eight-year-old girl, Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), who has recently lost her grandmother. For Sciamma, however, the leap between the two films isn’t as big as it seems.
“I feel like the films are holding hands,” she says. Sciamma dreamed up the idea for Petite Maman before she started work on Portrait Of A Lady On Fire. Yet the experience of making her period drama helped her to look at the emotional impact of her work, and realise that she wanted people to bring their own stories to the experience of watching her films. “I was feeling fully charged by how the tools of cinema can be magic, because they can have an impact on life,” she says. “That’s why I decided to go with magic realism.”
The film takes place in Nelly’s grandmother’s home and its surrounding woodland. When Nelly meets another eight-year-old called Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), her story takes a fantastical turn, with her family somehow appearing to her in an entirely different form. Though the idea of writing a two-hander between two eight-yearolds might seem ambitious to some, for Sciamma it was no different than writing her 18th-century heroines in Portrait Of A Lady On Fire. “I’m not afraid for a character to be very serious and willing to understand someone,” she explains. “Kids are philosophical. I want to respect them as individuals.”
This approach to making films for children and not just about them mirrors the approach of one legendary filmmaker in particular. Studio
Ghibli fans may see comparisons between the film’s young heroines and those in Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro or Spirited
Away. Sciamma, a fan of the filmmaker herself, says this is no coincidence. “I used him as a compass,” she says. “He takes children seriously, he takes female characters seriously. He has a serious connection to nature. Sometimes to solve a question on set
I would ask, ‘What would Miyazaki do?’”
Though it didn’t set out to be, Petite Maman became a response to the global pandemic that seized the world in 2020. Sciamma started writing the film in March that year, a week before Covid-19 forced France into lockdown. The filmmaker momentarily abandoned the project as the pandemic worsened, and when she came back to it, found new meaning in her story. “Suddenly the film was charged with the collective moment that we were going through,” she remembers. “We were losing our elders in nursing homes and not saying goodbye to them. Things felt more urgent, and so it motivated me to write the script very quickly.”
Production couldn’t be further from the crowded sets and theatrical costumes of Portrait Of A Lady On Fire. Sciamma recalls her eerie commute to the studio in France during the pandemic. “It felt really dystopian,” she remembers. “I’d be driving down these empty streets, feeling very connected to the world.” Connection it seems, is the key to Sciamma’s cinematic universe. What comes next is anyone’s guess. PETITE MAMAN IS COMING SOON TO CINEMAS AND MUBI