With each consecutive movie that director/screenwriter Céline Sciamma has made, she has built upon her reputation as an innovative, exciting, persuasively feminist filmmaker. Her heartbreakingly beautiful and emotional period piece from 2019, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” cemented her standing as a top-tier director — one who is adept at more than just contemporary observational dramas.Ms. Sciamma’s latest film, “Petite Maman,” which opens Friday in New York, returns the writer-director to more a modern milieu, though viewers are never quite sure what decade we’re in exactly. Neither cellphone nor tablet is spotted in the entire film. The vagueness of the time period is matched by the movie’s almost fairytale setting: a small, uncluttered house somewhere in the supremely quiet, forested countryside of France.The uncanniness of these details (or lack thereof) creates an atmosphere that’s both disarming and lulling, a combination akin to the movie’s subject matter. Like the Jacques Doillon-directed “Ponette” from 1996 or René Clément’s classic “Forbidden Games” from 1952, the film is essentially about how children deal with death and dejection, a genre almost unto itself in France. “Petite Maman” begins with 8-year-old Nelly (Josephine Sanz) losing her maternal grandmother; as the movie proceeds, she tries to understand what this loss means for her and her parents. The primary resource at little Nelly’s developmental disposal is her imagination and she uses it to conjure up her mother’s 8-year-old personage (played by Josephine’s twin sister, Gabrielle), as well as her grandmother as a middle-age woman. Like an imaginary friend, she plays with her mother-as-a-child, the two of them building a shelter made of fallen branches in the woods and play-acting a murder mystery. These scenes, in particular, exude immense charm and intelligence through their evocations of childhood fun and the forms of refuge children take when faced with disease, uncertainty, and unhappiness.One question to ask while watching: Is Nelly imagining her interactions with her mother-as-a-child or is the viewer entering the realm of the fantasy film? Ms. Sciamma seems to hint at both interpretations via editing that connects sleep and daydreaming to Nelly’s “other life,” and through a physical path through the woods that may facilitate time travel. The transitions from naturalistic to fantastical and back and forth are handled so seamlessly that you may not care. Although quite short — the movie clocks in at 72 minutes — “Petite Maman” never feels rushed or to be missing some essential element. Similar to how Nelly says to her father that what she’s been told of her parents’ childhoods are “just short stories,” that she wants to know about “the real things,” the movie gets to the heart of what grief and fear feel like for a child. Also, how a mother’s love, through generations, is always present. Even when she’s not there.
