[As usual, I tried to do this without any spoilers beyond the film’s synopsis or trailer, but some of the things I wrote below may hint at certain events in the film, so don’t read if you don’t want any spoilers.]
What happens to the grief that we accumulate when we were children? Is this accumulation only a result of our own losses or also the losses of people around us? How does it shape our actions once we become grown-ups? How does it affect the people around us? Do we seem like sad people with possibly sad childhoods even though that is not how we would describe our childhood?
How do we interpret our parents’ grief, especially when it
keeps sparking even long after the exact time of a loss? Do we get so occupied trying
to figure out the cause of their sadness and how to fix it? Does their grief blind
us to our own grief?
Does a parent’s grief blind them to their children’s grief? Or
is it the kitsch we create for children that causes that blindness? That kitsch
tells us that children are care-free and joyful beings. Nobody wants to think
that children can grieve. Most parents would do anything to prevent their
children from looking sad rather than letting them process or express all their
emotions. But don’t we actually share many of the losses in a family?
What happens when we were raised by grieving parents or
surrounded by grieving adults? Do we internalize that grief? Does it become the
emotion we are the most familiar with without really understanding what it really
is?
When do we really understand the influence of the losses
experienced during childhood? When do we observe the link between them and our
fears? Do we need to reach an equal level to our parents to finally put things
into perspective, to understand our actions as well as theirs?
When do we become equals to our parents? How much maturity
does it take? Is it even possible to be equals with them or will there always
be an imbalanced power dynamic between us? Do these power dynamics shift the
other way around as we get older?
Petite
Maman depicts grief from the eyes of a child, Nelly, who just lost her
grandmother. Nelly tries to process her own grief. In parallel, to a greater
extent, she is trying to understand the grief of her mother, not just the grief
triggered by their recent shared loss, but her accumulated grief since
childhood.
In just 72 minutes, embodying the folk tale narrative of a
hero’s journey, Petite Maman is about many things in addition to grief. It is about
being a parent, especially motherhood. It is about our relationships with our
parents. It is about love, especially the love between two people who are
equals. It is about the path to become equals to people whom we, partly due to the
laws of nature and partly due to the laws of traditional society, aren’t equals
to by default.
During this cold and stormy winter morning, Petite Maman was
a very subtle and, in the words of my partner-in-crime-in-movies, tender blanket to be wrapped up in,
while (re)visiting one’s childhood.
