Céline Sciamma’s beautiful fairytale reverie is occasioned by the dual mysteries of memory and the future: simple, elegant and very moving. Joséphine Sanz plays Nelly, the eight-year-old daughter of Marion (Nina Meurisse); Marion’s mother has just died in a care home. Marion and her partner (Stéphane Varupenne) take Nelly on a difficult journey to the late woman’s home. It is where Marion grew up and the memories come flooding back – particularly that of a secret hut she built in the woods adjoining the house. She is overwhelmed with grief and leaves Nelly alone with her dad.
Playing in the woods, Nelly comes across what appears to be a half-finished hut in a clearing. A girl waves happily to her, asking for help in making it. She is the mirror image of Nelly (played by Gabrielle Sanz, evidently Joséphine’s twin sister) and announces that her name is … Marion. They go back to Marion’s house, an eerie mirror-image of Nelly’s mother’s childhood home. And there Nelly meets Marion’s kindly, withdrawn, thirtysomething mum, who walks painfully with a cane.
It is a ghost story, or a parable, played with realist calm. The girls talk about the future and the past as casually as they would about anything else. I found myself holding my breath for long stretches, as the young stars insouciantly saunter in single file along the narrative tightrope. I’m not being facetious when I say that this meeting of the two girls reminded me of Marty McFly’s first encounter with his dad in Back to the Future, another brilliant film of a very different type. There is something eternally strange about the fact that your parents were once the same age as you, had the same worries and fears and thoughts as you, and the same inability to see into the future – which is you. Making these two characters vulnerable and delicate children is an artistic masterstroke on Sciamma’s part. What a superb movie.
