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

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

PART TWO: From the Uncanny to the Marvellous…and Back Again

In the first part of this blog post, I looked at how Petite Maman evokes the fantastic in its movement between what Tzvetan Todorov calls the uncanny and the marvellous, through the tale of a young girl (Nelly) meeting her own mother (Marion) at the same age. In this second part, I will look in further detail at the magical uncertainty, ambiguity and a wavering between different cinematic modes that Sciamma’s film presents.

In their very first encounter in the film, we see Marion play mother to Nelly – taking her wet clothes and offering a dry towel, making cocoa on the stove – in a way that uncannily evokes the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s observations on the role of imagination in development, where he notes:

Fig. 1 - Playing mother.

[A] case where two sisters, aged five and seven, said to each other, “Let’s play sisters.” They were playing at reality. (…) It is very easy, for example, to have a child play at being a child while the mother is playing the role of the mother, that is, playing at what is actually true. (1978, 95)

Marion is at first unwittingly acting out reality as she cares for her future daughter; but following Nelly’s declaration, this “playing at reality” becomes more explicit as the two girls address each other as parent and child in a polymorphous slippage of pronouns and grammatical tense. For Vygotsky, play incorporates fantasy and reality as means of negotiating the world: and so we might interpret the opening up of Petite Maman’s magical scene as an expression of Nelly’s desire for her grieving mother to “come back to her” and to play what is actually true: i.e. to be her mother once again (Fig. 1).[1]

This supernatural event – meeting her mother as a child – also allows Nelly to learn more about her present by investigating her mother’s past: particularly in terms of the impact of a life-changing operation that will save young Marion from her own mother’s fate. If, as Emma Wilson notes, Sciamma’s previous films “offer a passing through from an imaginary world of play and infatuation into a new world of the real” (2021, 37), then Petite Maman shows how this new world is nonetheless dependent on the world of play. The film presents an impossible, magical instance that allows Nelly to return to “reality” with fresh understanding.[2]

However, Petite Maman would not give us the “pure” marvellous, as Todorov describes it, wherein “supernatural elements provoke no particular reaction in either the characters or in the implicit reader”: e.g. the self-contained world of the fairy tale, where magic is simply part of the fabric of reality as in Totoro, for example. The strange events in the film do provoke a reaction from Nelly, which, as I noted in the first part, was certainly echoed by this reader-viewer, at least. Rather, it might seem to suggest what Todorov identifies as the “fantastic-marvelous”, “the class of narratives that are presented as fantastic and that end with an acceptance of the supernatural” (1973, 53-4 & 52): which is to say, narratives that provoke a degree of uncertainty until their meaning is finally sealed with confirmation of magic events with magic causes, as in the spirit realm, or reikai, of Spirited Away. If we accept Nelly’s version of the story, that she really did encounter her mother as an eight-year-old girl, spend time with her, share stories, memories and visions of their future, then we find ourselves not in a “sublime modern fairy tale” per se but very much in the realm of fantasy nonetheless.

Fig. 2 - Nelly and maman.

I must admit that I did not initially notice Nelly’s father call her mother “Marion” on their first morning in the house and so when the girl in the woods introduces herself as “Marion” it did not seem unusual. Had I noticed, this would certainly have compounded the film’s sense of uncanny doubling (or perhaps it simply tips us off from the outset as to the girl’s identity: it remains difficult to speculate in hindsight). In my ignorance, however, the final scene seemed all the more significant: as Nelly is reunited with her adult mother, whom she names – with affection (and perhaps a little defiance) – “Marion”, they embrace as maman reciprocally recognises her as “Nelly” and the film ends. If we’re not aware that she had been identified previously, then the ultimate act of naming here decisively seals the connection between Marion Jr and Marion Sr as it does the bond between mother and daughter. If we do remember, then perhaps we should take the repetition as a re-naming as Nelly and Marion re-find each other after having been apart (Fig. 2).

Either way, we can interpret it as a moment of reconciliation: having ventured into her past and explored the world with her mother, Nelly has come to some understanding about their lives and the struggles that Marion faces (and has faced), while perhaps achieving some purchase on her grief at the same time. On the one hand, this makes for a satisfying ending – in which we settle for Todorov’s fantastic-marvelous of an unsettling supernatural accepted but unexplained – and is in keeping with Sergeant’s observation that the role of fantasy was originally “to reconcile its listeners to the paradoxes and contradictions of the surrounding world through stories that posited the existence of powerful, magical forces” (2021, 12). Like Spirited Away’s Chihiro, Nelly re-emerges from the spirit world better prepared to face the changes in her life.

Fig. 3 - Secret baby.

But on the other hand, there remains a degree of uncertainty here. We are also shown the girls play acting scenes from a murder mystery: doling out characters and lines, debating characterisation and dramaturgy, and working through scenes. The “play” ends with a moment of possible reconciliation between the inspector and the widow characters as the latter reveals their secret baby (a toy doll), which also potentially serves as a moment of reconciliation (and redoubling) between Nelly and her own mother: Marion presents a facsimile of her child to her playmate, in a sense presenting Nelly to herself as they share a moment of connection. In light of this play acting, then, I begin to wonder why we should treat the rest of the interactions between Nelly and Marion as any less playful. Just because the murder mystery is more explicitly marked as fiction, and – on revealing her idea that Marion must be her mother – Nelly insists that she must be believed, this does not make the latter necessarily any more factual.[3] This would not diminish the process of “working through” that Nelly undertakes over the course of the story but it would shift the emphasis from “fantasy” to “phantasy” grounded in play (while Sergeant nonetheless emphasises the important relation between these modes [2021, 29-30]). This is also where the echo of Hiroshima I noted in the first part might resound most strongly: Nelly’s reconciliation with her mother would be as a result of the girls’ role-playing (not unlike that of Resnais/Duras’ Il and Elle) and an imaginative identification as mother and daughter, rather than a magical happening (Fig. 3).

Alternatively, we might read the film in a slightly different way. Formally, Petite Maman is certainly focalised through Nelly: it begins withs a single following shot, tracking Nelly as she passes from room to room bidding the residents “goodbye”. This establishes our alignment with her as protagonist, which does not shift for the remainder of the film. It is from her perspective that we first encounter Marion and with her that we move between the spaces of her adult parents and the spaces of her playmate. Nonetheless, it is still tempting to imagine that the situation is reversed: that Marion has conjured Nelly from the future to reassure herself that the impending operation will be a success. Nelly’s existence would, then, be a testament to Marion’s own survival and ability to thrive following the procedure. This is even hinted at when, during an exchange between (petite) mother and daughter, they discuss Nelly’s birth. Marion asks, “Did I want you?” Nelly is unsure but seems to think so, yes. Marion responds that it makes sense because she is already thinking about her child. Nelly would, then, be the spectre of Marion’s daughter-to-come, summoned to allay her anxiety in a child’s act of spectacular imagination.

The conventionally accepted reading of the film – endorsed indeed by the director herself – would seem to be the marvellous one. But there persists, I’d argue, an ambiguity throughout the film that aligns Petite Maman with fantastic experience. As Wilson notes, Sciamma’s work is concerned less with psychology than with “action and embodiment”, more about the “how” than the “why” of what is happening: exploring rather than explaining (2021, 45 & 47).

A final wavering, then: between the discourses of fantasy and the discourses of art cinema – where, of course, ambiguity reigns supreme – which could be considered characteristic of Sciamma’s cinema in general. There might seem a strange incongruity in the creator of complex, challenging arthouse texts such as Water Lilies or Portrait professing such mainstream tastes as Spielberg and Zemeckis. But in this sense Petite Maman could be the definitive Sciamma text for the way in which it negotiates these registers – the concerns of children and the concerns of adults, the appeal of mass entertainment and the difficulties of high art – while settling finally on neither.[4] Sciamma’s cinema gives us the joy of connection and the ache of separation, allowing us to revisit the sharp-edged pleasures of remembering without ever having to let go.

**Article published: January 21, 2022**

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.

Vygotsky, Lev. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge: HUP.

Wilson, Emma. 2021. Céline Sciamma: Portraits. Edinburgh: EUP.

Notes

[1] In an early scene, we see the roles reversed as Nelly passes food and drink to her mother in the car before wrapping her arms around her neck in a much-needed embrace.

[2] It also permits Nelly to revisit her grandmother and say the “goodbye” that was originally denied to her.

[3] Here I am reminded of Baudrillard’s famous observation that the function of Disneyland was to make the rest of the USA appear less fake.

[4] The serious themes of Sciamma’s screenplay for the children’s animation, My Life as a Courgette, certainly point in this direction – and Petite Maman uncannily evokes the setting, style and concerns of her previous works.

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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