Petite Maman (2021)

Céline Sciamma's reputation arrives at the door ahead of her. After Portrait of a Lady on Fire, she'd earned the right to be trusted, and so I sat down with Petite Maman in a spirit of good faith. Seventy-two minutes. A child recently bereaved, a forest, a mysterious friendship, the whiff of something quietly magical. What's not to like? Quite a bit, as it turns out, though I want to be careful here because this is a film I'd rather nudge than slam.

The setup is genuinely lovely. A young girl, still processing the death of her grandmother, wanders into the woods near the family home and meets another child. The premise carries an implicit promise: that something tender and strange is coming, that grief might find an unexpected shape, that the magic realism hovering at the edges will eventually land somewhere meaningful. Sciamma's instinct for intimacy is evident from the first frame. The light is soft and natural, the interiors feel properly inhabited, and the two child performers are completely unaffected in a way that's genuinely hard to coach out of young actors. On a purely visual and tonal level, the film is doing everything right.

And yet. The film drags. I know that sounds almost absurd to say about something that barely clears an hour and ten minutes, but there it is. Scenes stretch past their natural conclusion. Conversations circle without going deeper. The pacing is clearly a deliberate choice, meditative and hushed, but meditative and monotonous are not the same thing, and Petite Maman too often crosses into the latter. There's no real narrative momentum building underneath the stillness, no dramatic tension holding you in place while the mood does its work. You need one or the other. Without either, you're just waiting.

I can see exactly what Sciamma is going for. She wants the film's central ambiguity, about time, identity, who these children actually are to each other, to wash over you slowly and settle in the chest rather than announce itself. It's an admirable instinct. The trouble is that ambiguity without enough weight behind it stops being mysterious and starts feeling vague. By the time the emotional payoff arrives, quiet and gentle as it is, I wasn't moved so much as mildly consoled. The pieces are all there. They just never quite lock together into something that feels fully formed. It's a sketch. A beautiful one, but a sketch.

What's frustrating is that Sciamma clearly knows how to balance restraint with precision. She's proved it. Films like Mustang (2015) show what French-language cinema about girlhood and interiority can achieve when the discipline holds all the way through. Petite Maman has the discipline but not quite the architecture to support it. The bond between the two girls is sweet and the performances are natural, but sweetness and naturalism aren't enough on their own when the story underneath is this slight.

I don't want to be unfair. There are moments here that genuinely work. The tenderness is real. The film's interest in how children understand loss, and how they might imaginatively reach backwards through it, is a worthy subject handled with obvious sincerity. This isn't a cynical or careless piece of work. It's just an undercooked one. And coming from a director whose previous films have been so carefully assembled, that undercooked quality stings a little more than it might from someone else.

Three stars. Worth seeing once, especially if you've got the patience for slow, mood-driven filmmaking and a particular softness for stories about childhood and grief. But if you're expecting the precision and emotional force of Sciamma at her best, prepare yourself for something rather slighter than you'd hoped.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2021  | Watched: 2026-04-16

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