Petite Maman (2021) as a Contemporary Manifesto for a Transcendent Union

by: Dan McKay , October 5, 2023

Director Céline Sciamma has described her mid-pandemic production of 2021’s Petite Maman as a ‘rescue mission.’ ‘I rushed because I felt the film was needed … It was because there were a lot of goodbyes we won’t have said, a lot of kids who have experienced death, a lot of isolation, and we need images that are full of that experience’ (Sciamma quoted in Matheou 2022). The film is Sciamma’s fifth feature as writer-director. It follows the journey of a young girl, eight-year-old Nellie (Josephine Sanz), who, having recently experienced the loss of her maternal grandmother, arrives at the residence of the deceased with her unnamed father and her mother, Marion. For Marion, the property is a vessel of her own childhood memory and, overwhelmed by the experience, she leaves the site in the film’s first act. Before long, Nellie meets a young girl, also called Marion, to whom she bears a striking resemblance (the young Marion is played by Josephine’s twin, Gabrielle Sanz). The two engage in play, and in this they come to the realisation that they are an identically aged mother-and-daughter pair. Their meeting is made possible via a slippery dissolution of the dualistic paradigm of interiority/exteriority which manifests as a safe zone aligned with childhood imaginings, securely realised beyond the logic of linear temporality.

Sciamma’s previous work has been widely championed by critics for its successful formalisation of what Kelli Fuery terms the ‘reciprocal gaze’ (2022: 201). This auteurist trait of Sciamma’s, she writes, is characterised by an ‘emphasis on recognising the subjectivity of the other and the intermeshedness of power, ethics, freedom, and desire in our relationships with others. The bond between girls or women that is created within each of Sciamma’s film diegeses is further established between screen and audience’ (Fuery 2022: 201). It is well established that Sciamma stands rather comfortably as one of the foremost contributors to the contemporary cannon of queer filmmaking, yet the intent of this essay is to draw upon philosophies of modernity and poststructuralism, as well as the words of Sciamma herself, to propose an argument that—beyond the overtly radical subject-queerness of the likes of her previous films—the gaze of Petite Maman’s quiet domesticity bears the ability to queer the very nature of patriarchal-capitalist rhetoric on relationality, and in this acts as a timely ‘rescue mission’ to retrieve youth and agency from a treacherous grey-area of desperately crisis-ridden patriarchalism. Furthermore, an instructional reading of Sciamma’s film identifies that the implications of its revisionism regarding the loss of childhood narrativity (and its non-hierarchal basis) is capable of proposing a recalibration of our relationships with trauma and conflict in terms of both the micro and macrocosmic. In conversation on Petite Maman at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival, interviewer Anas Sareen summarises the filmmaker’s outlook with similar optimism: ‘What is beautiful to you, Céline Sciamma, it seems to me, is when we understand each other. I think, perhaps, that’s the best encapsulation of what your cinema produces in viewers. To bring us to that moment where the war ends.’ ‘I am a strong pacifist,’ states Sciamma in response, nodding and wearing a broad smile. ‘I am all about bridges’ (2021: 00:57:10).

‘I Play More Characters Than You’: The Anti-Oedipal Protagonist

Such notions may, at first, appear overwrought when raised in association with the homespun intimacy of Petite Maman, but it is exactly Sciamma’s matter-of-fact assumption of transcendence into the very structure of the quotidian in girlhood narrativity that points to limitless reassessment of the phenomenology of relationships in the household and beyond. The feminist theorists Dianne Negra and Yvonne Tasker have claimed that girlhood experience ‘offers a fantasy of transcendence and evasion, a respite from other areas of experience’ (2007: 2). Accordingly, it appears true of Nellie that a foregrounding of her position as unfixed in the coming-of-age process distances her from a sense of surrender to the status of ideologically governed subject. To situate this concept more broadly, Petite Maman’s central characters all, whilst grounded in realist mundanity, appear collectively as anti-archetypal flows, inadequately categorisable within the power imbalances of contemporary France’s assumed patriarchal, neoliberal rhetoric, and are therefore prone to explicate its stunted logic. Nellie’s father figure emerges as a symbol of behaviourally ‘present’ inactivity. In his exposition, this busy cleaner, this soft and intelligent ‘DIY’ figure, is nonetheless defined by an alignment with the extension of these male-identified, faintly industrious traits into a repressive, myopic urgency which arises from a context of crisis wherein sensitivity and the provision for emotional evolution are observably vital. The patriarch appears not as a guiding source of wisdom, but as an understudy, a companion, whom, at a gentle but limited juncture of emotional understanding requires the lesson of role-play rather than role-alignment from his female offspring. Conversely, Nellie’s mother (in the present, so-called actuality of Sciamma’s setting) is defined by thoughtful absence, by a catalytic reticence rather than a conventional nurturing function. Thereby, in Petite Maman, the matriarchal archetype, too, is radicalised. It is a site of multiplicities, of transformation, of trans-temporality, and of creative fertility in the imaginative desire to both unify and self-actualise. Thus, the porous and camera-identified mind of the female child is the lynchpin through which signifiers of a broader consciousness of social coding may interact and diffuse. It is the seed for change, and therefore the rather literal nucleus prone to govern and reshape the parameters of the outermost membrane of the cellular, ‘nuclear family.’ The character of Nellie, I argue, acts as a personification of anti-oedipal utopianism.

In their first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus (1984), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari radically antagonise the then-largely assumptive, psychoanalytic basis that the motivation for our desire, and thus our actions, is lack (‘Desire is a relation of being to lack. The lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It is not the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists’ (Lacan 2007 [1954]): 223)). Anti-Oedipus’ alternative to this binary paradigm cites desire itself as a constructivist force, stating that ‘to withdraw a part from the whole, to detach, to “have something left over,” is to produce, and to carry out real operations of desire in the real world’ (Deleuze & Guattari 2013 [1984]: 56). This is certainly true of Petite Maman’s protagonist. Nellie—surpassing the archetype of the primitively playful child in her desire to truly conquer the ‘adult’ notion of grief through close, creative understanding—functions as a break from the chain of signification associated with linear inheritance, and therefore the Freudian/familial framework. Nellie curiously claims the immaterial memories of her mother as her own, seemingly without thought of authority or rebellion. She interferes with the rigidity of the parent as statically defined deliverer-of-ideology/implanter-of-lack by literally bypassing the logical boundaries of visible age and spatial distance as markers of disparity. Thus, she withdraws herself from the ‘whole’ of familial hierarchy to grow via intuitive and non-ideological means. ‘What is left over,’ then, is the vivid manifestation of such restorative non-linearity into her transformed, objective environment. Nellie is not lacking in her adolescence, but actively works in collaboration with ‘transcendence and evasion’ to forge a path through an epistemological wilderness (made literal by the liminal gateway of the woodland zone), which, in its limitless potentiality, provides a novel form of agency.

‘I Come from This Path Behind You’: Reframing the Aesthetics of Haunting

Jacques Derrida’s assertion in Spectres of Marx (1993) that ‘to haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept’ (1993: 161) proposed a view which has since destabilised the conventional ontological view of ‘haunting’ as a periodic contact with individual repression. Scholars of hauntology (‘in contrast to “ontology” that thinks of being as self-identical presence’ (Hägglund 2004:47)) have often fixated upon Derrida’s repeated use of the Shakespearean aphorism ‘time is out of joint’ (Shakespeare, Hamlet, quoted by Derrida, epigraph) as an observation reflective of the manner in which ‘haunting can be seen as intrinsically resistant to the contraction and homogenisation of time and space [which] happens when a place is stained by time, or when a particular place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time’ (Fisher 2012: 19). The aesthetics of Petite Maman’s mise-en-scène, particularly with regards to costume and set, are fundamentally anachronistic, and although a subtle trait, this feature of the film acts as a powerful lubricant which allows the viewer to engage with its slippery laws of spatio-temporality with little resistance. Sciamma, who also acted as costume department for the film, has said that this decision was vital ‘so that a kid from the 1950s and a kid from 2020 could connect to the film. We were trying to build a common childhood through 50 years of costume design, interiors, accessories, and attitudes. It was counter­intuitive, finding this very special language of the film’ (quoted in Matheou 2022). Mark Fisher, a key contributor to studies in hauntology writes: ‘anachronism, this experience of time that is out of joint, is in fact the very subject of the [hauntological] film’ (2012: 20). Yet beyond this ability of the experiential, audio-visual medium to destabilise the very notion of time—which, as concrete perception of time is central to our narrativising process, also manifests as the ability to deconstruct rhetorical signification—what seems perhaps most potent is the manner in which, above all, Sciamma strives to curate an aesthetic of equality.

Just under a third of the way into the film, we are introduced to the young Marion. After receiving the news that her mother has made the decision to leave, Nellie finds a small wooden box amongst Marion’s childhood artefacts which she is told contains a bounce-back paddleboard game. ‘So it’s meant to be played alone?’ She asks her father. ‘Yes. In a way.’ He appears seemingly defeated amidst the difficulty of engagement with his wife’s direct experience of grief. There is an oppressive quality to the distance here. It is indicated that the couple did not sleep in the same room and, almost elusive to Nellie, the fragility of her father’s state appears largely peripheral to our elliptical narrative. Ineptitude in the act of listening—and thus, also, the potential of experiencing equality through the surrendering of involuntary self-importance in his alignment with the solemn, patriarchal role—punishes the father, who, unlike Nellie does not remember Marion’s childhood stories but remembers a fear of his own father in youth. He sits much lower than his standing daughter in the close two-shot. Nellie is seemingly unperturbed as he smiles drowsily yet with visible authenticity. There is an emotive balance in both composition and performed action. The much larger, older male is softened by Nellie, and they both compassionately animate one another. Two-shots of the like, which are balanced and ambiently (if not always literally) symmetrical, dominate the film’s cinematography, and are evocative of equality even on the simplest level of filmic grammar. ‘Perfect,’ the young girl announces, and bolt-upright, as if called to action by her father’s ‘mission’ for her, she turns and rushes outdoors to play alone (in a way). Before long, the string which binds the ball to its container snaps. This sends the airborne ball deep into the neighbouring woodland and, seeking its destination, Nellie is led to the young Marion and her work-in-progress treehouse. Of course, it is notable that the inciting device for this encounter is the literal bisection of a uniquely ‘haunted’ game (played by a single child in the present and another in the past). In its interaction with elasticity and the laws of nature, the bounce-back paddleboard suggests the presence of another—the equal and opposite reactive force. As the pair explore the woods, narrow lenses compress space and entangle both Nellie and Marion with the vast wilderness which, depicted from the girls’ eye-level, appears imaginatively boundless in opposition to their shared matriarch’s small, dim house. Unusual for most filmmakers, the encounter with a seemingly impossible doppelgänger is marked, in adherence to Sciamma’s reciprocal gaze, by an enthusiastic wave and by Nellie’s rushing over to Marion to bear half the weight of a heavy tree branch. Almost instantly, she finds herself assisting in the erection of a treehouse with nothing but immediate allyship as motivation. This construction of equality which spills beyond mere aesthetics, I argue, is another way in which Sciamma queers the Freudian basis of hegemonic grief/trauma narration.

In defining the titular phenomenon of The Uncanny (das Unheimliche), Sigmund Freud’s 1919 article states that ‘the prefix “un” is the token of repression’ (2003 [1919]: 368), and the phrase more broadly originates in the German for ‘unhomely’—the negation of comfort. According to Dimitris Vardoulakis, Freud clarified that ‘negation is a hallmark of Thanatos [the death drive], and this directly links negation to the “return of the repressed.” The “return of the repressed” which, according to Freud, is one of the characteristics of the doppelgänger, may then be paraphrased as the “return of negation”’ (2003 [1919]: 101-102). Vardoulakis continues:

these are confrontations, in consciousness of what the unconscious cannot deny. Negation does not merely signify an area of resistance where the conscious self is unable to exercise judgement, nor does it merely construct an excluded zone in the topography of the ego. Rather, through ambiguous expression, negation facilitates relations between regions of the ego’s topography (2006: 102).

It is plainly identifiable, then, how Sciamma’s reintroduction of the concept of the doppelgänger significantly radicalises the long-held dualistic notion that haunting is a self-contained phenomenon which may only be rendered productive in terms of the individual ego (and only once worked through by a typically male-coded psychoanalytic guide, further still). For Petite Maman, the introduction of a doppelgänger into its healing narrative does not symbolise the emergence of chaotic interruptions to a chain of egoic rationality by the unresolved traumas of an unconscious mind. Instead, this doppelgänger is fundamentally tied to the undead, creative child-self of another (Marion), and marks an optimistic expansion of conscious topography into the realm of the collective. As this mutual confrontation with childhood transcendence finds form, as does a radical iteration of emotional intimacy which may proliferate and actualise outside of the oppressive self-bound isolation of conventional ego identification and structure.

The arrival of this seemingly self-reflective other is not cinematically marked by signals of aesthetic negation such as the presence of mystical, extra-diegetic sound cues, nor by the juxtaposition of the ‘dream-like’ with the aesthetics of the quotidian, but by the arrival of a new, realist productivity into the coming-of-age diegesis. Such notably absent devices would invoke surrealism, the artistic advocate for Freud. Juxtaposition, interruption, negation, the abject, the uncanny—all features of surrealism—are fundamentally rooted in affective manifestations of conscious/unconscious conflict and so are rejected by the film’s non-violent language system. Notably, the French-originated surrealist movement’s very manifesto-statement insists that systemic change can only be achieved on grounds of violence:

[t]he simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinisation in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level (Breton 1972 [1930]): 125).

By contrast (in lightness of touch), Sciamma explicates how such devices would implicitly support ostensibly counterproductive notions of reconciliation. Her aesthetic sensibility for Petite Maman grounds the diegesis in radical equality, and as such, the film arises as a manifesto for transcendence via ‘bridge-building.’ It revises historical criteria in the aesthetics of semiotic disturbance and oppositional ‘dream-logic.’ Petite Maman finds radical form outside of shock-factor and therefore the magic of Sciamma’s creation, as many critics have identified, is the manner in which it acts as ‘a ghost story, or a parable, played with realist calm’ (Bradshaw 2021).

Furthermore, where the conventional hauntological film deals with ‘broken’ time, Sciamma’s realist play on temporal non-linearity appears as a utopian correction of time, as a reclamation of the potential for relational growth via the intrinsic and universal realm of the resourceful state of childhood play. The act of building a treehouse, a shelter which excavates transcendence beyond urban rigidity, sees a mother and child heal in unison, unchained from the egoic notion of social restraint. This too is, by Deleuze and Guattari’s definition, anti-oedipal, decentring the cause-and-effect line of capitalist growth and its reliance upon inheritance and compliance. Additionally, the evolution of Nellie’s healing relationship with her mother which begins as softly as the unearthing of a strip of wallpaper—a marker of Marion’s past experience of home—and continues into a shared meal-preparation, the joint celebration of a ninth birthday, and ultimately the assumption of a mutual mother figure in Nellie’s once-deceased grandmother, operates not upon the functioning of the ‘unhomely,’ but in the ability of the girlhood experience to cultivate ‘homeliness’ from a state of crisis.

‘You Didn’t Make Me Sad’: Intuiting the Impossible

Although not entirely unproblematic as an assertion of airtight social commentary by the outsider director in relation to the young, impoverished, black subject (‘I really wanted to look at them’ (Sciamma 2014: BFI, 00:00:42)), Sciamma’s third feature, Girlhood (Bande de filles, 2014) successfully reclaims Marc Augé’s notion of the ‘hypermodern’ ‘non-place’ by highlighting the concept’s prior exclusivity in its orientation around the leisure of the white, male, privileged agent. Throughout the film, its central group of girls find themselves excluded by the social topography of the banlieue setting (a prison-like, real-world zone, seemingly designed to stunt their ability to escape a pre-determined fate or to fully self-actualise) and so they take comfort in the momentary lapse afforded by the limbo-status of occasional hotel-room dwelling. Augé writes, ‘a person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants … [h]e tastes … the passive joys of identity-loss, and the more active pleasure of role-playing’ (1995: 103). In accordance with this, Girlhood’s impersonal hotel rooms offer a liminal space in which the girls may explore, from a distance, the threatening options prescribed to them, and even allows them to live out temporary, pseudo-indulgent fantasies. Yet unlike the passive novelty of Augé’s description, Sciamma makes clear that this is the girls’ only respite. Discussing the film, the writer-director has stated ‘I like to think … that the end of childhood begins when nostalgia comes’ (BFI, 00:05:43), and, ultimately, it is only in this neoliberally capitalised zone that the girls can tragically identify a rite-of-passage into adulthood. Petite Maman’s politics are much more implicit, and at first glance the closest device we may identify as functioning within a radical debate of the ‘non-place’ is the woodland. Augé’s aforementioned identifying factors are, of course, present here. Nellie and Marion are able, through their dissociation from usual social and topographical determinants, to enjoy and ingest the complexity of fluid identity. Fundamentally however, the utopian vision of reinterpretation here is almost entirely dependent upon its blank-slate divorcement from any determinants of late-capitalist modernity. To explore this debate more civically, I would like to briefly discuss the representation of the nursing-home in the film’s expository sequence and, more specifically, the zone’s apparent failing in its social function.

The opening shot of Petite Maman is a tight close-up of an elderly woman who sits in a private room inside a nursing-home. ‘Alexandria,’ she concludes, before we pan, first to the active hand and then the face of Nellie, who scribbling the word into a crossword puzzle, only briefly makes eye-contact with her elder. They say their obligatory goodbyes and Nellie leaves the room. Although we hope otherwise, it is open to interpretation—yet likely—that this interaction is near-identical to that of the eight-year-old girl and her grandmother in their unseen final meeting (we are later made aware of Nellie’s dissatisfaction, and sense guilt regarding their last goodbye). She is the first of three women with whom we see Nellie perform this ritual and, as with the others, her character is credited only by the impersonal title of ‘nursing home lady.’ Each room appears identical, each goodbye monotone, and each of Nellie’s steps along the way numbed by protocol. The nursing home is a site of multiplicities. Each room represents an innumerable past, present, and future of intimate grief narratives, yet the vessel itself is devoid of personalisation. Reflective of the norm beyond the frame, the nursing-home structure is a cold simulacrum; through its packaging as a capitalistic, drag-and-drop means of commerce it is ‘no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance’ (Baudrillard 1995: 1). Here, with upmost relevance amidst a global pandemic, Sciamma establishes the extent of contemporary capitalism’s predominant structure for the packaging and working-through of death. In recognition of its overt, yet habitually assumed ruthlessness the scene acts as an effective exposition of the fundamental need for Nellie to actualise as anti-oedipal agent. Her passive joy and role-playing in this traumatic, liminal zone are productive only within the habit of brief entertainment and otherwise inconsequential problem solving (made literal by the crossword). It is only in the unfolding manifestation of her creative-intuitive drive, then, that Nellie may escape this prescribed paradigm.

A third of the way into the film, in increasing detachment from linear time, Nellie searches Marion’s house for clues to her identity and a key revelation of this process is the reintroduction to her grandmother, now transformed by the complex, relational puzzle of mother-to-twin-mother. On directing the young Josephine Sanz in this scene, Sciamma has said ‘it’s not about “you are scared that she’s your mother.” No, it’s about this is a spy film. So it’s about rhythm, it’s about the body, the attitude’ (Sciamma 2022: MUBI, 00:11:35). Accordingly, this sequence further centralises the manner in which Nellie’s status in girlhood transcendence allows her to holistically transgress the usual determinates of social-rhetorical meaning-production through playful curiosity and role-play. She is always present and amorphous, and it is in this unchained, primordial state that she evades the conditioned mind’s capacity for distractive and often myopic disconnection.

In his second volume on cinema, Deleuze writes of the need for the cinematic treatment of time to function via ‘contracting the image instead of dilating it. Searching for the smallest circuit that functions as internal limit for all the others and that puts the actual image beside a kind of immediate, symmetrical, consecutive, or even simultaneous double’ (2013: 71). Petite Maman’s explicitly mystical engagement with time as site-focused in this manner further complicates Fisher’s notion of haunting as resistant to the contraction of space-time. Paradoxically, this narrative interest in the shared topography of time, space, and trauma aligns with a process of encountering which the unliberated subject of oedipal inheritance may passively identify as ‘dysfunctional’ temporality, but which for our protagonist is entirely productive. Cautious yet determined, Nellie wanders down a dark corridor to her grandmother’s room. The POV shot reveals the sleeping figure upon a bed, (modified with an accessibility lift which was previously seen as Nellie’s parents cleared the grandmother’s nursing-home room). Shortly afterward, a match-shot sees Nellie lying in the now-dim and otherwise unoccupied bed: she is now significantly more connected to her grief of an unresolved farewell. The tableau is drenched entirely in blue light and, momentarily irretrievable, Nellie sinks deep into the evocative milieu. Especially relevant to the filmic treatment of grief, ‘light empties the image and simultaneously creates it, founds the image of which it is its finitude’ (Brinkema 2014: 110), and thus here, Nellie is both the nucleus of the image and the field of action which opens to the projection of a transient drama. Elsewhere, the word ‘bulb’—that which sprouts into being out of the frost or may illuminate a room out of the darkness—is given by Nellie to her revived grandmother as she assists in solving another crossword puzzle. The spectator may consider the manner in which through such transgressive acts, Nellie emerges as the film’s own activating bulb, as an almost messianic figure of hope, able to resurrect through the communal sharing and inhabiting of memory.

Familial scenes of grief which operate via mundane yet life-infused/ ‘haunted’ objects such as old games, the accessibility lift, and the cane (a marker of hereditary illness, and which Nellie decides to keep for herself after the event of her grandmother’s passing), bring to mind Roland Barthes concept of the ‘punctum’ (1981: 27). This photography term was coined amidst the writer’s own reflection upon the loss of his mother and refers to the incidentally captured detail of an image which may puncture, disturb, and emotively infuse the image beyond its source-context via the pricking spectator’s own intense, and often traumatic experience. There are many occasions throughout Petite Maman in which our protagonist appears thusly pricked, radically changed, and therefore prone to ponder more and more elusive truths. These moments, however, do not violently shatter Nellie’s sense of sanctuary, but precipitate her curiosity and therefore her healing. As I have established previously, these impossible encounters—in their urgent relationship with the extra-diegetic, as well as their grasp over the unfolding narrative realism—cannot be dismissed as mere fantasy. ‘You kept her stick?’ the young Marion asks of her daughter/ peer as their shared trauma becomes an object of study, ‘Yes. It smells like her hand.’ ‘You liked her a lot.’ ‘Yes, very much.’ Only through manifesting the impossible can the family come to terms with their loss in this deeply involved manner. In contrast with the aloof farewells uttered upon Nellie’s introduction, and now detached in setting from repressive frameworks of capital, Nellie gazes thoughtfully at her equalised mother. To again quote Fisher, what this haunting allows for the awareness of ‘is less the failure of a future to transpire—the future as actuality—than the disappearance of this effective virtuality’ (2012: 16). Nellie is not only processing the loss of her grandmother, but projecting herself into her mother’s present condition, thus realising the mortality of her own mother and the future vanishing of this childhood realm. Through Sciamma’s reframing of girlhood temporality, the child prematurely reaches the point ‘when nostalgia comes’ without growing detached from the creative potency of youth, and thus she bears the ability to relish every moment of transcendent union.

‘Mon Coeur est Dans ton Coeur’: Conclusion, or Petite Maman’s Rescue Mission

Immediately after this climactic exchange between the twinned young girls, Nellie’s father arrives. In a previous scene, finally possessed by Nellie’s infectious play-drive, he and his daughter had worked together to shave off his beard. The sequence evokes Sciamma’s Tomboy, in which the patriarch is defused via mimicry and anti-oedipal idealisation by his gender-queer offspring. We are also reminded of a very early sequence in the film in which the straw of a juice-box is fed between the adult Marion’s lips by her daughter as she drives to her childhood home. Here, the grief-stricken mother displays a foretelling ability—through an excavation of her neglected capacity for girlhood role-play—to allow Nellie to literally bring her nourishment through role-reversal. Rather potently, it is only in this shaven state that the father is allowed access to his daughter’s active transcendence and may directly perceive the child-made incarnation of his wife. The mutually enacted removal of the beard denotes the removal of disparity from the father; he is de-aged and detached from this typically male-exclusive signifier of difference. Furthermore, after being granted her father’s permission to spend another day with the young Marion, Nellie indulges in the miraculous opportunity to be touched by, and bid a heartfelt farewell to, her revived grandmother. Perhaps even more crucially, it is only after this ultimate occurrence of patriarchal acceptance, wherein transcendence is finally assumed into male-coded law-of-rationality too, that the mother figure returns so that the family unit may truly unify. ‘Thank you,’ Marion addresses him with confidence, seemingly praising both his role in making possible the birth of a miracle in Nellie, as well his timely transformation. It is no stretch then to identify the voice of Sciamma herself here, optimistically, and pre-emptively acknowledging the change that this revisionist force of union can make beyond the diegetic frame, even within the contextual bounds of the often-impenetrable rhetoric of neoliberal patriarchy.

The final act, performed in private by the young mother-daughter pair, is overtly reflective of Sciamma’s framing of the film as a ‘rescue mission.’ Nellie and Marion steer a rubber dinghy—strikingly similar in appearance to a life-boat—into the heart of an otherwise inaccessible stone pyramid. A consolidation of the colossally transcendent potential of the film as manifesto, this monument is spiritually anachronistic in nature, yet grounded in immediate verisimilitude by its brutalist veneer. The so-called ‘music of the future’ soundtracks the sequence. Hauntingly cosmic and synth-led, its lyrics set Petite Maman’s intention deep within the emotive core of the viewer:

‘Children’s voices

Will sing

New dreams.

The dream of being a child away from you,

The dream of finally being with you. 

If my heart is in your heart, your heart,

Your heart is in my heart.

If your heart is in my heart, my heart,

My heart is in your heart.’