Marvellous Strange: Petite Maman (Sciamma, 2021) and the Fantastic - Part I

SPOILER ALERT: This piece discusses the plot of Petite Maman in detail.

PART ONE: From the Uncanny to the Marvellous…

Fig. 1 - Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021).

To describe Céline Sciamma’s new film, Petite Maman (2021) (Fig. 1) as “Alain Resnais does Bridge to Terabithia” would surely be to do a disservice to all involved, and the director’s own references are – more appropriately – Alice Guy-Blaché, Germaine Dulac and Miyazaki Hayao (especially My Neighbor Totoro [1988] and Spirited Away [2002]).[1] But there is something of the porous temporality of Marienbad and the Duras/Hiroshima-inflected melding of identities as characters work through trauma and grief – in the context of two children building a magical world (as a means of escape from more adult problems but also as a means to navigate them) while playing together in the woods – that renders this film particularly evocative.

In the attendant publicity material Petite Maman is described as “a sublime modern fairy tale” and the blurb on mubi.com summarises the film thus:

After the death of her beloved grandmother, eight-year-old Nelly meets a mysterious friend in the woods. Together they embark on a fantastical journey of discovery which helps Nelly come to terms with this newfound loss.

Its style and narrative therefore traffic in the genre discourses of fantasy cinema where children negotiate magical woodlands and a confusing grown up world alike. The quasi-sororal relationship between the girls and an absent/ill mother harks back to Totoro in particular, while Nelly’s passage between “our” world and a world of wonder connects her to Chihiro in Spirited Away; while Sciamma is also an avowed admirer of The Secret of Nimh, Toy Story 4, Back to the Future, Big and E.T. – the influence of many of which might be discerned in this film where Nelly encounters a girl named Marion playing in the forest, whom Nelly comes to believe is in fact her own mother at the same age.

Petite Maman does not perhaps match the breath-taking splendour of Sciamma’s last film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), but it is – on its own terms – a cinematic delight of tenderness, wonder and uncertainty. And it is this sense of experiencing and working with a sort of magical uncertainty that I want to focus on in what follows. In this two-part blog post, then, I will explore the techniques Sciamma’s latest film uses to create an ambiguous journey between worlds, genres and modes of cinematic expression.

In Encountering the Impossible, Alexander Sergeant argues for a reconsideration of fantasy beginning, in part, with Tzvetan Todorov’s discussion of the fantastic, the marvellous and the uncanny: a framework that will, I suggest, prove invaluable in understanding the experience of Sciamma’s film. As Sergeant notes, this model considers an encounter with strange events and a fundamental uncertainty as to whether they are really happening or can be dismissed by rational explanation. If they are indeed happening, then we are in the realm of the supernatural that Todorov designates the “marvelous”; and if they can be accounted for within the laws of the natural world (even as an hallucination), then we are in the realm of the “uncanny”. As Sergeant emphasises, the wavering between these two possibilities is what Todorov identifies as the “fantastic”: a hesitation in the face of an apparently impossible event (2021, 14-15).

Initially, Petite Maman seems to provoke an experience of an even more explicitly Freudian uncanny: particularly in Freud’s emphasis on the subversion of the homely in the term itself (unheimlich), and in the figures of the uncanny double and returning dead. When we first encounter Marion in the woods she is visually dissimilar enough from Nelly (hair style, colour and style of clothing), does not have her same waddling gait, and is glimpsed from a sufficient distance so that there is no immediate confusion between the girls. But from this point on, Petite Maman seems to be constructed specifically to evoke a sense of confusion, a doubling or conflation of these new playmates through both narrative and style.

Fig. 2 - Twin sisters Josephine and Gabrielle Sanz as Nelly and Marion.

While the film often favours a longer take, the most signficant cuts are between Nelly and Marion: full-face close-ups of each girl become interchangeable as we move back and forth between them while they talk and play. And as they take off distinctive over coats and the hair of each tumbles about their faces, the two girls become increasingly indistinguishable (Fig. 2).[2] Petite Maman also doubles other aspects of mise-en-scène to compound this sense of conflation/confusion: when Marion brings Nelly home during a rainstorm, it appears as a duplicate of Nelly’s own grandmother’s house. Here we (like Nelly, arguably) might be forgiven for initially overlooking this similarity as we are distracted by pouring rain and rumbling thunder. Though Nelly does, even unconsciously, begin to notice these architectural similarities as she passes down the hallway and almost absently presses the wall to reveal a hidden cupboard just as there is concealed in her grandmother’s house. She does not stop to inspect it, does not seem perturbed by it, simply reclosing the door and continuing on her way: perhaps signalling a child’s equanimity towards the unexplained, or perhaps the unheimlich comfort she finds in this unusual home.

This strangeness is further emphasised as Nelly wanders alone through this oddly familiar space. She encounters a sleeping giant (Marion’s mother) dozing in a room that mirrors her own grandmother’s chamber. But then she reaches the toilet at the end of the hall and something weird and unexplained happens: she opens the bathroom door but does not go inside. Something seems to deter her: an anxiety about navigating a stranger’s toilet, or perhaps facilities that were disgusting or unusable? In hindsight, we might read this as another moment of unheimlich for Nelly: something inescapably familiar about this space which sets off her suspicions. She looks in a bedroom and finds exercise books like those she had read the night before with her maman. Nelly excuses herself and leaves the place (Fig. 3).

Nothing is explicitly confirmed here, but there are also other clues: the same lime-green wallpaper in Marion’s kitchen as in Nelly’s grandma’s house, that Marion’s own  grandmother was also called “Nelly,” that the girls meet at the site where Nelly’s maman used to build her den, etc. Up until this point, then, the question that the film seems to pose is whether this is all just a very weird coincidence or whether something impossible is really happening: are there simply two houses with identical layouts built reasonably close to each other and occupied by similar families (plausible, perhaps), or has Nelly – as we come to believe – stumbled into her mother’s own past, whether by power of imagination, magic or time travel.[3]

Fig. 3 - Hallway hesitation.

Here we can note that Todorov makes a further distinction within the uncanny, between events “real/imaginary” – where, in fact, “there has been no supernatural occurrence, for nothing at all has actually occurred: what we imagined we saw was only the fruit of a deranged imagination” (i.e. dreams/hallucinations such as the conclusion of Alice in Wonderland) – and events “real/illusory”, wherein “events indeed occurred, but they may be explained rationally (as coincidences, tricks, illusions)” (1973, 45): a chance encounter that while implausible was not in fact impossible (as frequently revealed at the end of Scooby Doo). First of all, then, in Petite Maman the choice would seem to be between an illusory-uncanny on the one hand (“this is all just a strange coincidence”), and then imaginary-uncanny or forms of the marvellous (i.e. imagined or magical events) on the other. If Marion is Nelly’s mother, then we move towards the latter modes; if not, then we settle on the former. Nonetheless, the film does seem to uphold the uncertainty to a point, and this wavering – embodied directly in Nelly’s hesitation on the threshold of the bathroom in her playmate’s house – offers character and audience alike an experience of the fantastic properly defined.

The point at which we, as viewers, make the connection between Marions junior and senior does not necessarily coincide with the point at which Nelly does the same – and will doubtless be particular to our own dispositions and foreknowledge. As Mike Williams notes, it is “difficult to talk about the plot of the film without giving you a major spoiler” (2021, 6); and, for my part, I had been – in a cinephilic affectation – particularly mindful not to read anything about the film in advance so as to savour the treat of a new Sciamma all the more. However, such careful cultivation was upset on my way to the cinema, no less, as I stumbled over a single sentence press description of the film on social media: something to the effect of “a young girl meets her own mother as a child”. Sadly, then, I knew from the outset how the film would go, but tried very hard to forget this fact and let it play out as something like a naïve first viewing. As such, I can only speculate on where the moment of realisation for the viewer might be reached: perhaps the true identity of Marion really is patently obvious from the start (the title of the film would seem to indicate this), or perhaps it does come as a blind-siding twist – and I would be interested in readers’ experiences of the film on this point. For Nelly, this realisation seems to crystallise as she explores her playmate’s uncanny home, but nothing is made explicit at this stage. It is not until she approaches her friend in a subsequent scene and explains that she believes Marion, in fact, to be her petite maman that the connection is overtly made.

Once Nelly makes this revelation – and Marion professes to believe her – the film seems to depart the illusory-uncanny (i.e. it isn’t all just a strange coincidence) and moves towards the magical new possibilities of the marvellous. Indeed, the subsequent external corroboration of papa acknowledging Marion as she visits their house would also seem to discount the imaginary-uncanny: unless the film is really cheating us at this moment, she must be part of an external or shared reality for Nelly and her papa – even while the laws of this reality might remain unknown to us.

In the forthcoming second part of this blog post, I will continue to explore the ways in which Petite Maman evokes the marvellous, while introducing still further uncertainty, ambiguity and a wavering between different cinematic modes.

**Article published: December 10, 2021**

Notes

[1] Reportedly, Sciamma’s mantra on set was “What would Miyazaki do?”; and on Dulac, Sciamma opines: “She was a philosopher of cinema, an activist for cinema as a language and as a grammar. Her writings are still very interesting and relevant – she’s saying that cinema isn’t literature, it’s music. I thought a lot about her.”

[2] In fact, twin sisters Josephine and Gabrielle Sanz play Nelly and Marion, respectively.

[3] Much of the film’s promotional material seems designed to uphold the mystery: e.g. referring to the playmate as a mysterious friend or a “strangely familiar girl.” The Pyramide and Madman trailers do reveal her identity, however, while the MUBI trailer does not.

References

Sergeant, Alexander. 2021. Encountering the Impossible: The Fantastic in Hollywood Fantasy Cinema. Albany: SUNY Press.

Todorov, Tzvetan. 1973. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University.

Williams, Mike. 2021. “Editorial.” Sight and Sound 31, no. 9 (November): 6.

Biography

Ben Tyrer is a lecturer in film theory at Middlesex University. He is the author of Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and co-editor of Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable and Femininity and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2016 & 2019). He is co-coordinator of the Psychoanalysis in Our Time research network and the Psychoanalysis and Film BAFTSS SIG, and a member of the editorial board of Film-Philosophy.

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