Petite maman Reviews

(SemanaULima) Little film, but takes its time to contruct its tone, idea and little impact. Nice girls complicity, sense of opportnity and time...

To be honest, I really had no idea what to expect from this flick but I was certainly eager to see what Céline Sciamma would do after the amazing ‘Portrait de la jeune fille en feu’. I have to admit that I had no idea what it was about before it started and it took me a while before I discovered she went for some magic-realism. Unfortunately, I’m not a great fan of the genre. To me, it felt like some kind of French Indie version of ‘Back to the Future’ and I have never really been fascinated by this idea of spending some time with one of your parents while being the same age. Fortunately, Ietje, who had chosen this film, had some very interesting insights who helped me to better grasp this concept. Indeed, according to her, this movie was not really about time traveling but more about showing how a young child might try to cope with such a dramatic event. From this perspective, the movie became much more interesting. However, I wish they tried to cut down the dialogues and focused more on the young girls spending some time together, like any other kids. Indeed, at least half of their conversations were so obviously written by adults and would never come out from such young children. For example, at some point, towards the end, one of the girls asks if she was ever wanted by her parents. Sure, I can imagine that kids might be wondering about such matters but there is no way a 8 year old would us these exact words. Anyway, to conclude, even if I didn’t feel much connection with this material, it was still a really intriguing movie and it is definitely worth a look.