Sciamma’s ‘Petite Maman’ — A Personal Reflection
What a film about daughters and mothers taught me about fathers, sons and masculinity.
Perhaps it is the isolation and introspection of the pandemic, or perhaps it is a deeper presence with my own creative practice but recently so many films have been speaking to me on a personal level, where what they explore relates directly to things I am unearthing in myself. As Peter Bradshaw expresses in his Guardian review of Céline Sciamma’s dreamily perfect Petite Maman,
“There is something eternally strange about the simple fact that your parents were once the same age as you,”
and to extrapolate from that, that they were once children.
Several Christmases ago, I had a mini, one-night-only breakdown, soon after seeing my long-estranged father. During the visit, he gave me a pile of old black & white photos, many of which were of him as a child and also of his own father. One night, when I’d returned home late after too much drink and too much toxic male friendship, I poured a fresh whisky and picked through the photos, illuminated by the flickering Christmas tree lights.
There he was, the boy-man who had sired me, whom I had resented my entire life, the male I had built myself in opposition to. There he was, as a boy. A lost boy. A boy who I knew had not received the love and attention that he had craved and who therefore, unsurprisingly, could not give it when he himself became a father.
There he was, blowing a trumpet, digging a hole, looking out from a hospital bed. I wondered, had his childhood inner life been as fully populated as mine, nurtured by the absence of any real parental intimacy? Did he wonder? Did he dream? What potential did he see for himself as he grinned out at the camera, grateful to have that momentary focus on him.
And there, also, was his father, impassively looking on, distant, disconnected, the way that sometimes some fathers do.
Seeing this that night, placing myself somehow, impossibly, in this lineage of men before me, feeling my resentment of them and yet understanding that they had also laboured under the same burden of masculinity… it broke me. I had never, not once ever, had a meaningful conversation with my father: he was the absence of a man even when he was present.
Someone said to me once,
“If fathers could speak to their sons the world would be a very different place.”
And therein lies the pain and challenge for boys growing into men. There’s an innocence in boys that gets stamped out and replaced by something wholly more unwholesome. It’s what we do to prove ourselves, to measure up to an image which we men are constantly mis-sold as that of manhood. An image that needs to change.
Celine Sciamma’s films show a solidarity between women in the support they show for each other, an equality between them in an unequal system. In her 2019 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma frames the three central women (the Lady, her maid and the artist) to show them all on the same level, regardless of societal status, and presents them as providing mutual support, especially for the maid. It is everything that can be right with the world, if we put our attention to it.
In contrast, men live in a patriarchy defined by competition, a constant striving to be more than the other, to be the one who stands out, above the rest. It is everything that is wrong with the world and always has been, whether it is on a football pitch, in an aggressive company practice, or in simple inter-male dynamics. It is there, always, skulking in the corner, while other times taking centre-stage. This need to ‘hierarch’ (to make a verb of the noun), to position oneself above another, to seek dominance.
Not all men are guilty of this, for most of us it is an almost automatic behaviour, a received behaviour, and what will hopefully become a bygone behaviour. Looking ahead, there is scope to reverse the flow, for sons to teach fathers. After all, what are children if not a natural evolution from their parents, a forward propulsion? We need to unlearn the sins of the father, to meet them perhaps in their own childhood in order to understand where they’re coming from, just like in Petite Maman. But if we are to reach back to our forebears it is no longer with our hands open, grasping to receive their wisdom, but instead to hand to them the guidance they did not have. For masculinity to evolve this must happen on a global level, in the stories we tell about men and how these stories model how men talk to men.
As life imitates art and my father slowly fades away in a care home, my own work now engages with this theme. A fairy tale of fathers and sons, played straight. I’ve been writing a new screenplay, once again from the perspective of a child, it’s my way into a story, my way into wonder. It might be the next film for me and my creative partner Mark, and if that happens then perhaps it will also speak to others the way Petite Maman speaks to me.
The narratives of women inspire me, they always have. I grew up in a family of women, they formed my pantheon even though my immediate surroundings outside were hostilely masculine. There are of course many inspiring narratives of men too but we want more. I heard that in South America there is a saying,
“Every time a girl is born we take a step closer to peace.”
I also read this quote today, from the great Nineteenth Century American social reformer, Frederick Douglass:
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
I’m sure we can all agree that, as a species, we need better versions of masculinity to step up right now, so we can be the best we can be and contribute positively to this world. At our very highest aspiration, all men have a sole mission upon which to focus: to contribute to raising better men. It might start with the way fathers speak to sons or the way brothers speak to brothers, but for me tonight, it started with seeing Sciamma’s fairytale of girls speaking to girls, of daughters speaking to mothers.
