Petit Maman

72 minutes. That's the entire runtime for this gem of a movie, and it's a breath of fresh air. The common wisdom these days seems to be that narrative should stretch out; post-Game of Thrones everything is suddenly a television show that doesn't really get cranking until midway through the first season, but this movie is a testament to the idea that a complete narrative can be communicated swiftly without sacrificing any of the pathos or character development that gets praised in longer productions.

I hesitate to spoil this movie, but it's been out for several years and the title is basically a giveaway. If you're particularly keen to go in unaware, watch it and then come back to this post. It's only 72 minutes!

This movie is about a an eight year old girl who through the magic inherent to the woods in France meets an eight year old version of her own mother while cleaning out her recently deceased grandmother's house. This is trippy, heady stuff, but it's delivered so straightforwardly that it never feels overwrought. The movie's not interested in milking the conceit for its mystery, it never presents the girl discovering the younger version of her mother as a twist. Instead, we are presented with and immediately accept the reality that this girl is interacting with her mother as young girl.

The bulk of the movie consists of the girl and the child version of her mother simply hanging out. They play in the woods, they have a sleepover, they confide about their fears. They get to know each other before our eyes, and it all serves as a master class in the axiom to show instead of telling. It's all shot very beautifully, and the acting is great throughout, but nothing is flashy or attention grabbing. The excitement comes from just watching people be human and normal in an interaction that is impossibly abnormal.

It results in a film that never wastes your time. At one point, the main character's adult mother basically states the movie's premise by musing that we can never really know who our parents are because we can never know who they were before we arrived. Through the few days that she spends with the child version of her mother, our protagonist discovers what we already intuitively know: Our parents were very similar to us as children, perhaps more than we could bear to know.

I loved this movie, both for its economy and because I recently became a parent and the ideas this movie toys with are constantly nagging at the back of my mind. I don't know if this movie would hit as hard for viewers who don't have children, but I suspect there's still a lot to love. Either way, give it a chance. There are many worse ways to spend an hour.