Saturday, September 17, 2022

Petite Maman (2021)

IMDb plot summary: Nelly has just lost her grandmother and is helping her parents clean out her mother's childhood home. She explores the house and the surrounding woods. One day she meets a girl her same age building a treehouse.
Directed by Céline Sciamma. Starring Joséphine Sanz, Gabrielle Sanz, and Nina Meurisse.

Petite Maman follows an eight-year-old girl who is staying with her parents in her late grandmother's house as they clean it out. She ends up wandering the nearby woods and making friends with another little girl, only to discover they have a surprising connection. (It's not really much of a spoiler but the movie itself doesn't make it wholly obvious what their connection is until later, so I'll leave it vague here.) The film is very short at just 72 minutes, and the result is a simple, sweet fantasy story about two little girls' friendship. Sisters Josephine and Gabrielle Sanz play the two girls, and they have a very natural camaraderie together that really brings the story to life. They're delightful to watch interact, and as their bigger story unwinds it just piggybacks on that delightfulness. It's hard to come up with much more to say about it without going into details that I think work best if you don't know about them beforehand, but it's well worth a watch.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Petite Maman > Camp
Petite Maman > The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Petite Maman > Six Degrees of Separation
Petite Maman < Equus
Petite Maman > Before Sunset
Petite Maman < Pygmalion (1938)
Petite Maman > Conspiracy Theory
Petite Maman > Hard Candy
Petite Maman > Bicycle Thieves
Petite Maman < Saving Mr. Banks
Petite Maman < I'm Not Scared
Petite Maman < Heathers
Final spot: #294 out of 3683, or 92%.

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