But grief is a concept largely foreign to a child wise beyond her years and eager to play pretend as an adult, yet still distant to the reality of death. During the journey from the nursing home, Nelly attentively feeds her grieving parent cheese puffs and apple juice from behind the driver’s seat, then slides her tiny arms around her mother’s neck in an embrace to comfort her as she steers the wheel. By all accounts, little Nelly seems to get on well with her mother. Following the death of her maternal grandmother, eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) travels with her parents (Nina Meurisse and Stéphane Varupenne) to her mother’s childhood home. In Petite Maman, Céline Sciamma’s follow-up to 2019’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the French director returns with a much smaller affair by comparison: A compact, 73-minute (yet nonetheless affecting) portrait of grief, parenthood and the constant dialogue between our past and present selves. But most of the time, in every way that isn’t physical, she still feels like a kid. She admitted that sometimes she does feel like she ought to: Like a woman in her early sixties. I wanted to know if my mom had ever felt this feeling, and if she had, if it ever goes away-if people ever reach a point where they know that they’ve finally, officially stepped into adulthood and shed their adolescence. I told her that I still don’t feel like I’m an adult, that I feel like a teenager disguised as a person in their mid-twenties. So please, using what we found, support great filmmakers and a great industry in the midst of its metamorphosis.Ī year or two ago, I asked my mom whether she feels like her age, or if she feels younger. And if 2021 had anything going for it, people had more time and ability to look than ever. The variety was there, if people wanted to look for it. It was a year of strong, slow cinema and a year of the trashiest fast-fashion fodder you could imagine. It was a year of franchise entries screwing with intertextuality, for better ( The Matrix Resurrections) or worse ( Space Jam: A New Legacy). It was a year of freaky mothers (of car babies, lamb babies, baby Annettes), reverend mothers (Charlotte Rampling, in both Dune and Benedetta), tiny mothers ( Petite Maman) and parallel mothers ( Parallel Mothers). Did they talk about movies more this year? It sure feels like it.Īnd they thankfully had some great films to discuss: Not only did we get exciting releases from American masters, but many festival and international films from the past few years finally made their way stateside now that theaters were open. Did people watch more movies this year? Hard to say. We were flooded with memes, as movies like Dune inspired an audience that was often more captive than usual and increasingly choosing to watch new releases at home. Our main solace, though, is that the movies have been incredible and more widely available than ever.Ģ021 renewed debates around theatrical-only debuts for all but the Spider-Manliest of blockbusters (superheroes counted for four of the top five box office spots-all of them, if you agree with me that the Toretto clan are effectively comic book characters), but it also allowed people to catch everything from miniscule documentaries to a new Matrix from the comfort/safety of their living rooms on streamers broad and niche. The main change is that instead of a sharp fear for our health and industry, we have a deadened and numbed resignation that things are just pretty tough-and, as we’ve seen with theatrical attendance ebbing and flowing alongside coronavirus spikes/variants, they will be until we agree to take the pandemic seriously. movie on streaming at the same time as in theaters shocked the industry? Unfortunately, if you remember all that, you also have a pretty good handle on 2021. Remember 2020? When movie theaters shut down and everyone had a nice long think about what it meant for the Future of Movies? When HBO Max’s gamble to release every Warner Bros.
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