Céline Sciamma, 2021 #17, 2021 Skandies
ces spoilers ne sont
pas si petits
In my last article I mentioned
(for about the hundredth time) that I didn’t think that
The Great Gatsby should be a staple of the
high school curriculum, because it’s about turning thirty
and teenagers can’t relate.
Petite Maman poses the question, what if
you can tell that something is wrong with your mom, that she’s
sad all the time and you feel like maybe it’s your fault
somehow, but you can’t really talk about it with her, because
she’s an adult woman and you’re an eight-year-old
girl?
Sure, you understand sadness, maybe even depression, but you
can’t really relate to whatever
she’s going through, because you just don’t have the
life experience or even the neurological development.
The high concept behind this movie is that it flips the old
“I wish I were big” premise.
Eight-year-old Nelly and her parents have gone to clean out the
house of Nelly’s recently deceased grandmother—the
house where Nelly’s mom grew up.
But her mother, Marion, seems to have a habit of running off when
her moods come over her, and Nelly wakes up one morning to find that
it’ll just be her and her dad again for a while.
While her father continues cleaning out the house, Nelly tries to find
something to do, and discovers an old paddleball—too old,
it turns out, because the brittle elastic snaps and the ball goes
flying off into the woods behind the house.
Nelly goes to retrieve it, only to find a little girl the same age
as her building a fort out of fallen branches.
The other little girl asks for help, and the two kids make some
decent progress on the fort.
As a storm starts to roll in, Nelly asks the other girl what her name
is.
“Marion,” the girl replies.
It starts to rain and the two kids run back to Marion’s
house.
It is identical to the house where Nelly is staying, except this one is
lived in—by Marion and by a woman in her forties who
is unmistakably Nelly’s grandmother.
Nelly quickly catches on to the fact that both paths out of the woods
lead to the same place, except one goes to 2021 and the other to
1998.
The wish Nelly had hinted at has come true: “I wish she were
little.”
Anyway, this movie is slight (the running time is barely over an hour) and consists mainly of these two girls playing, in a manner very similar to what my friend Mandy described on Facebook back when her daughters were that age: “I’m a horse!” “I’m a homeless baby!” “I’m the Chinese ambassador!” But still, for Nelly to find a version of her mother who is less opaque and can connect with her on her level is a lovely bit of fantasy.
Bruno Dumont, 2021
#15,
2021 Skandies
Apparently the finest day that Léa Seydoux ever had was when she learned to cry on command, because this movie is basically all about her character crying: pretty crying, ugly crying, crying at appropriate moments, crying at inappropriate moments. She plays a celebrity TV journalist by the name of France De Meurs—I guess the U.S. equivalent would be if her name were America McDyess or something. The movie spends a lot of time highlighting the artifice of her job—like, she spends a lot of time in an active war zone (deliberatly unspecified, but my guess is that it’s meant to be Libya), and she or members of her crew absolutely could get shot or be hit by the mortar shells landing all around them, but we see her doing multiple takes of her lines to the camera to make sure she’s got just the right crack of the voice and quiver of the lip when she says “du malheur and de la désolation”. She’ll do a hard-hitting interview and then repeat her questions to nobody in order to get the reverse angle when this footage is edited into a segment for her show. We also see that every moment of her life ends up as tabloid fodder, and that out in public she can’t take three steps without someone coming up and asking for a photo with her. You can probably guess that the movie is a satire about how fake and vapid this celebrity who shapes the opinions of the French public turns out to be… except that guess is actually wrong. At the very least, she is not without feeling. At one point, distracted by her young son, she accidentally knocks over a young immigrant on a scooter with her car, and she is shaken up about it for weeks. She visits the family multiple times, and compensates them not only for the hospital bills but for a year’s income—all of this without cameras, unlike the Youtubers who make sure to film their acts of charity. This is one of the factors that lead to France’s nervous breakdown…
…and while, midway through the movie, I had thought that I would be offering up “celebrity TV journalist has a nervous breakdown” as a quick synopsis of the premise, things actually keep getting worse for her. Let me put it this way. There is another car accident in the movie. (France isn’t in the car.) Here’s how it unfolds. The car is cruising down a winding mountain road. Close-up of the tire blowing. The car starts veering from side to side; the driver can’t get it under control. The car flips. As it is flipping around, we see the occupants getting cut by shards of window glass. Then the car flips into the path of an oncoming truck. The truck smashes into the car. The truck then drags the car along for a while before coming to a stop. Right as the truck finally manages to stop, the car topples over a cliff. Ka-bam, the car lands upside down at the base of some rocks dozens of feet below. We see the occupants’ limp, bloodied bodies. And then the car explodes into flame. I see that France is billed as a “comedy-drama”, and I honestly couldn’t tell whether this sequence was meant to be horrifying or whether the way that the disaster kept getting worse and worse and worse was meant to be darkly comic—my reaction by the end was certainly a disbelieving “oh, for fuck’s sake”. And that scene is pretty much emblematic of how the title character’s life goes—so I’m not sure how much more I got out of the entire film than “oh, for fuck’s sake”.
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