#Petit Maman

[ittakestwopod]

Thought I would put together a selection of our episodes that I think tumblr would appreciate!

Check them out if you are interested:

Episode 13: Little Mammies

An episode comparing When Marnie Was There (2014) and Petite Maman (2021), touching on topics of mental health and grief through the eyes of children.

Listen on: Our website | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts

Episode 23: Sapphic-on-Sea

An episode comparing Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and Ammonite (2020), queer films by queer filmmakers, with a lot of focus on female achievement and erasure in science and art.

Listen on: Our website | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts

Episode 24: Cross-Country Queens

An episode comparing The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), highlighting the importance of vibrant positive queer films in the 1990s.

Listen on: Our website | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts

Episode 39: Be Your Own Penguin

An episode comparing Surf’s Up (2007) and Happy Feet (2006), films about talking penguins with weird hobbies highlighting environmental issues and the human impact on climate change.

Listen on: Our website | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts

Episode 41: Lovesick

An episode comparing The Fault in Our Stars (2014) and Five Feet Apart (2019), got your nerdfighter/John Green content and conversations about love, mortality, hope, etc.

Listen on: Our website | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts

Episode 46: Roll for Initiative

An episode comparing Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) and Dungeons & Dragons (2000), which is just a lot of fun because we love D&D and we loved watching the new movie and tortured ourselves with the 2000 movie.

Listen on: Our website | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts

[denimbex1986]

'There’s always genre. When a veteran director runs out of steam, there’s nothing like a time-honored narrative structure to give ’em some lines to color inside. But in their latest films, Andrew Haigh and Aki Kaurismäki haven’t turned to genre out of desperation or fallen back on it as a safety net. Instead they glance off its conventions to tell stories they might not have been able to otherwise.

All of Us Strangers is a ghost story. Or at least—I don’t want A24 stans to get the wrong idea—Andrew Haigh’s idea of a ghost story. These specters roost inside our heads, where they can seem more real than the material world outside; they can allow us to make peace with the past, or they can lure us away from our lives into deceptively comforting fantasies.

In Strangers, Andrew Scott is Adam, a solitary gay screenwriter old enough to remember the AIDS epidemic and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who lives in a nearly unoccupied London high rise with huge windows that only serve to reinforce his isolation. He’s currently writing about his parents, who died in a Christmas Eve car crash when he was 11, and for inspiration one day he takes a train out to his hometown. That’s when the uncanny sets in.

While roaming the woods outside of town, Adam spies a young man a little ways off, and follows him to a shop. When they finally talk, you might suspect at first that Adam’s being cruised, but the man turns out to be his father (Jamie Bell), who takes Adam to his childhood home to see his mother (Claire Foy). The reunion is effusive on the part of the parents, who remain the same age as they were when they died, while Adam appears a bit overwhelmed as he tells them of his adult life.

Returning to London, Adam soon meets the only other occupant in the building (or at most one of the few), who, as fate would have it, is also gay and hot (and younger). Harry (played by Paul Mescal, just in case you thought this one was gonna have a happy ending) swings by soused one night, and Adam turns him away, out of politeness or reluctance or annoyance. Here, as throughout the film, Scott brilliantly inhabits a man who knows how to keep his distance. Adam’s smile is not malicious but not inviting either—it’s evasive, a way of putting people off while avoiding confrontation, and it’s clearly practiced.

We watch the two meet again, flirt awkwardly, kiss, fuck, and eventually spend the night together. They negotiate their age difference, debating the terms “queer” and “gay,” and share those parts of their life stories they feel are fit to share. The perfect foil to the reserved Scott, Mescal gives a bear hug of a performance here—Harry takes up space in a way that both unsettles and comforts Adam, with a baseline of darkness troubling his gregariousness. After a big snort of ketamine while they’re out clubbing, Adam imagines what their life together would be like, and that’s when we’re left to wonder how many of Adam’s interactions with Harry might simply be imagined.

Cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay allows Haigh to blur the lines between reality and fantasy without being too obvious about it. Strangers may in fact be Haigh’s most inventively filmed script to date, with the faces of these four very attractive people shot in extreme closeup or lit by a glare with an unseen source in a way that doesn’t uglify them but reveals nuances of character. Bell and Foy never seem anything less than real humans, and Adam’s childhood home is a solid, lived in space. In contrast, here’s something dreamlike and less than corporeal about his flat, which is typically dark or dim, and he and Harry are often seen in reflection as surreal mirror images.

All of Us Strangers stands alongside other recent smart, moving films about children and their parents like Charlotte Wells's Aftersun and Céline Sciamma's Petit Maman, which also toy ambiguously with the supernatural and dreamlike. But where the children in those movies seek to understand their parents, this is an exercise in retroactively imagining the particular kind of love you needed and didn’t get as a child. Adam’s parents turn out to be two sweet, flawed people, as so many of us are, but they aren’t totally idealized. “You don’t look gay,” Adam’s mum says clumsily when he comes out to her; his father recalls Adam crying in his room after school and admits that when he was a boy he’d have bullied a kid like that too. Past damage is addressed indirectly as well, and after hearing Foy murmur along to the Pet Shop Boys’ “Always on My Mind” as the family decorates their Christmas tree, it will forever be a song of a regretful parent for me.

The sort of director who knows when to stand back and let the actors carry the film, Haigh also knows how to end a movie with the sort of epiphany that redefines all that’s come before it. No final scene this century has knocked the wind right out of me as completely 45 Years, where the truth about her long marriage to a glibly evasive Tom Courtenay finally registers on Charlotte Rampling’s face once they finish their anniversary dance, keyed to a dynamite Moody Blues needle drop. All of Us Strangers’s ending is even more of a gut wringer, with a twist that might at first seem gratuitous until a final sequence set to Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “The Power of Love,” pulls everything together.

That ending has thrown more than a few viewers off (“Who was dead in this?” asks one two-star Letterboxd review desperately), and while I generally consider fan theories the preserve of those who prefer puzzles to movies and answers to art, the generally accepted reading is convincing this time. A ghost story but also a love story, All of Us Strangers suggests that everything we need to make us complete is already within us—and that this might in fact be the saddest fate possible...'

[celine-song]

Petite Maman (2021) dir. Céline Sciamma

[moonlightsdream]

FILMS IN 2023: → Petite Maman (2021) — dir. Céline Sciamma

[usermavka]

🎬 Petite Maman 2021, dir. Céline Sciamma

[p9fttt]

all time favourite movies:

petite maman (2021), dir. céline sciamma

[unmatto]

Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021)

[vampire-cenobite]

Jesse Reeves, The Sparrow

Jesse Reeves, nicknamed “the sparrow”. The girl whose mother died in childbirth, born lucky.

Jesse, who grew up in the company of a kind little girl named Miriam.

Jesse, who when she discovered her clairvoyance, was comforted by Miriam, who assured her that the ghosts couldn’t hurt her.

Jesse, who discovered that this mysterious girl who she had grown up with, was the ghost of her own mother.

Jesse, who on the brink of death was once again comforted by her mother.

Jesse, who as she was turned by Maharet into a vampire, had to say goodbye to her mother.

[verypersonalscreencaps]

PETITE MAMAN (2021, dir. Céline Sciamma) has entered the Criterion collection! Sciamma’s follow-up to PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE transcends time and space to weave a delicate fable about grief, family, and connection across generations. New cover by Carson Ellis

[mydarkapron]

PETITE MAMAN, 2021

Céline Sciamma

[sickeningwrecketh]

my parents didn't invent my sadness

[iknowwhentogoout]

my favorite films of the year

banshees of inisherin // emily // aftersun // tár // fire of love // bones and all // after yang // petite maman

[shisogelee]

managed to go like 12 years of my life never crying while watching a film....watched two cèline sciamma films this summer and so far two times out of two i've been ugly crying, unrestrained sobbing, tears running down my face snot etc

'you didn't invent my sadness' absolutely finished me

[letterboxd-loggd]

Petite Maman (2021) Céline Sciamma

December 22nd 2024

[lolochaponnay]

Un homme va au poste de police, accompagné de son fils, pour signaler la disparition de sa femme. Le policier lui demande: - Pouvez-vous nous la décrire? L'homme dit: - Elle est grande, belle, blonde avec des yeux bleus, une taille fine et une grosse poitrine. Le petit garçon s'exclame alors: - Mais Maman elle n'est pas comme ça. - Chut, tais toi, c'est pour qu'on nous en ramène une mieux!

[zodgory]

Which director's filmography would you rather listen to a series of podcasts about?

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