The love song of Nelly and Marion: Céline Sciamma’s Petite maman (2021)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Céline Sciamma’s fifth feature film, Petite maman, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in March 2021. Shot in autumn 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is a brief film (72 mins) and a return to the work with child actors which typified Sciamma’s first two features, Naissance des pieuvres (2007) and Tomboy (2011). After the death of her grandmother, a child, Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), helps her parents clear out her mother’s childhood home. She meets another girl of her own age in the woods, Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), who turns out to be her mother as a child. Petite maman offers space for love and care between mothers and daughters and opens out feminist perspectives on memory and grief. Drawing on representations of the mother as a child in Roland Barthes, Sophie Calle and others, as well as discussion of memory and secrecy in the work of Anne Dufourmantelle, this article explores the reimagining of love between mothers and daughters in Petite maman.