In a sentenceEvery child suspects their mother was once eight; this one gets to check, and finds she was good company
Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), eight years old, has just lost her grandmother. She says goodbye to the other old women in the care home, then drives with her mother (Nina Meurisse) and father (Stéphane Varupenne) to the house in the woods where her mother grew up, to clear it out. Her mother shows her the old schoolbooks and points out where she once built a hut of branches, and then, one morning, she is gone. Left with her father and a great many boxes, Nelly wanders into the autumn woods and finds a girl her own age hauling a branch across a clearing. The girl says her name is Marion (Gabrielle Sanz). She has Nelly’s face, and when the rain comes she takes Nelly home to a house Nelly already knows.
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Céline Sciamma’s 72-minute film about a girl who meets her own mother at eight is small, plain and stayed with us for days. It is so exactly made that you can sometimes see the joins, and we would not trade a minute of it.
Céline Sciamma made Portrait of a Lady on Fire in 2019, a period film with a great deal of room in it, and then she made this: 72 minutes, a handful of speaking parts, a house, some woods and a U certificate. Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) is eight. Her grandmother has just died, and her parents have brought her to the house in the woods where her mother grew up, to empty it. Her mother (Nina Meurisse) cannot bear the place and leaves. Nelly goes into the trees and finds a girl her own age building a hut out of branches. The girl’s name is Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), which is also the name of Nelly’s mother, and she has Nelly’s face. The title means Little Mum. Sciamma does not treat any of this as a twist, and neither will we. It is one of the best things she has made, and we recommend it with a caveat we will come to.
The film had us before the woods. It opens in a care home corridor, Nelly going from door to door saying goodbye to old women who are not her grandmother, and arriving at a stripped bed in an empty room. In the car afterwards she leans through from the back seat, feeds her mother crisps and juice and puts her arms round her neck, a child comforting an adult who has stopped pretending to be all right. We were undone by that, and we were not ten minutes in. Nothing in the scene asks for it. Sciamma simply lets a girl be kind and watches.
Claire Mathon, who also shot Portrait, keeps the camera at Nelly’s height and the light at autumn’s, so the woods are yellow and brown and faintly damp and the house is the colour of old wallpaper. Lionel Brison’s production design has a harder job than it looks. The house Nelly is helping to empty and the house Marion lives in are the same rooms dressed twice, one half-packed and cold, one with a kettle on, and you register the difference before you understand it. Julien Lacheray cuts without hurry; scenes end when the girls have finished, not when a line lands. Para One’s music barely exists until one song, in the last stretch, and its arrival counts because everything before it has been wind and footsteps.
The Sanz sisters are twins, and the whole film depends on how little they make of the situation. Nobody gasps. Marion asks for help with a branch, and they build the hut. They make crêpes and get flour on everything. They put on a play with wigs, an inspector and a countess, and take it exactly as seriously as children do. When Nelly works out who her new friend is, she is interested rather than frightened, which is how a child would be. Meurisse plays the grown-up Marion with a tiredness she never explains, Stéphane Varupenne is a warm and slightly useless father who lets Nelly shave his beard off, and Margot Abascal, walking with a cane through the same kitchen, gives the film its ache without a single big scene.
Our caveat is that it is so precisely built you can sometimes see the joins. Once or twice the girls say things no eight-year-old says, lines about secrets, and about sadness and whose fault it is, and for a moment we heard the writer rather than the child. Grief here is talked about with great tact and shown hardly at all. Nobody is allowed to be ugly, or loud, or unfair. We admired the control, and now and then we wanted it to slip. It is a fable that is never once permitted to be frightening, and we would have liked one scene where the woods felt like woods.
Among Sciamma’s own films it sits nearest to Tomboy (2011), which also watched a child over one summer and trusted the audience to keep up. It has none of the scale of Portrait and none of the noise of Girlhood (2014), and it does not want them. It also never runs short of things to do, which is more than we can say for a good many films twice the length.
It is a U. Watch it with a child if you have one, and with your mother if you have one of those, and expect a conversation afterwards. Seventy-two minutes on the clock, and you will spend longer than that trying to picture your own parents at eight.
The reviews lean strongly positive: 26 of the 28 recommend the film and none turns against it. The praise gathers in two places. First, the two young leads, twin sisters, whose easy rapport most critics name as the film’s centre and the reason its time-bending idea never feels forced. Second, Céline Sciamma’s restraint: small gestures, silent looks, a story told at a child’s eye level. Delicate, tender and small are the recurring words, all meant kindly.
The reservations are few and mild. IndieWire warns that the quiet scale may disappoint anyone expecting a larger emotional payoff; Slant finds the restraint occasionally over-calibrated; Deadline thinks some of the girls’ dialogue too sophisticated for their age; Variety calls it slight, though meaningful. The spread is narrow, running from warm to rapturous, and the two mixed scores come from reviews we could only partly read rather than from any real dissent. If critics fault it at all, it is for there not being more of it.
The critic describes the film as a tender, subtle exploration of childhood and memory. The review praises its delicate treatment of those themes.
Read the full review →Kermode gives the film an ecstatic verdict, calling it an astonishing and heartbreakingly hopeful cinematic poem. He particularly praises how its time-bending conceit lets children and parents understand one another across generations.
Read the full review →O’Hara finds the film elegant, compelling, and enchanting, with a wistful but hopeful emotional core. She particularly praises Sciamma’s graceful visual storytelling and the natural performances of the young leads.
Read the full review →Ehrlich finds the film delicate, enchanting, and emotionally resonant, though its quiet scale may disappoint viewers expecting a bigger emotional impact. He praises Sciamma’s subtle handling of the distance between parents and children, especially in small everyday moments.
Read the full review →The critic finds the film captivating and deeply affecting, a transportive story about childhood, loss and grief. They particularly praise the Sanz twins’ performances and the joy of the scenes they share.
Read the full review →Chang finds the film quietly spellbinding and emotionally moving, praising its gentle, imaginative take on a mother-daughter bond. He singles out the Sanz twins’ casting and the film’s precise, beautiful images.
Read the full review →
Tomboy · not on Fi1m yetSciamma’s earlier summer with a child, watched just as closely and just as plainly.
My Neighbour TotoroTwo sisters, a country house, an absent mother and a wood that gives things back.
The Spirit of the BeehiveA Spanish child takes a fable literally and the film is wise enough to follow her.
AftersunA daughter tries to see the young man her father was; the search hurts.
Ponette · not on Fi1m yetA four-year-old waits for her dead mother; French, unsparing, and led by a real child.
