"Little mother", by Céline Sciamma, a fantastic tale about the mother-daughter bond
Audio 01:20
The movie poster.
© Lilies Film
Text by: RFI Follow
3 min
Céline Sciamma marked the 2019 Cannes Film Festival with
Portrait of the Young Girl on Fire
, a love story between two women in 18th century France.
She returns to the cinema with a contemporary film and poles apart,
Petite Maman
, in theaters since Wednesday.
The story of a little girl who becomes the childhood friend of her own mother.
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Nelly helps her father empty the house of her maternal grandmother who has just died.
To distract herself, the eight-year-old girl goes to play in the adjoining wood.
And it is in the forest that she meets a little girl of her age.
Her name is Marion, like Nelly's mother who slipped away, overwhelmed by grief
Nelly meets her mother as a child.
This temporal paradox is never made explicit.
He is just identified and revealed by the two girls.
And this is one of the great strengths of this film which explores the complexity of family ties and the work of mourning, by filming, seriously but not seriously, children's games.
This impression of disturbing strangeness is reinforced by Céline Sciamma's choice to call on two twin girls to play Nelly and her mother Marion at the same age: sisters, clones, friends, mother and daughter.
And this ambiguity opens up different avenues and contributes to making this sketch a timeless fable.
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