The Psychology and Phenomenology of Play in Céline Sciamma's 'Petite Maman' (2021)

In her fifth feature film, the acclaimed fantasy drama Petite Maman (2021), French director Céline Sciamma returned to the subjects of childhood and playing that are a noted aspect of her filmmaking to date: games, sport and of course gender performance make up much of the action of Tomboy (2011), and she co-wrote the screenplay for Claude Barras’s stop-motion animated film about children Ma vie de Courgette (2016). The death of 8-year-old Nelly’s maternal grandmother in Petite Maman leaves her young mother Marion too grief-stricken to stay with Nelly and her father while the (grand)mother’s house is cleared. On venturing into the woods beyond the house, Nelly meets a girl her own age who is building a log tepee just like the one her mother reported building there as a child, a girl who tells Nelly her name is Marion. In the magical time-travelling interlude that ensues, Nelly and her ‘petite maman’ bond immediately and play together for several days, joyfully yet seriously, until ‘little’ Marion has to leave because of an operation she must undergo to prevent lameness in later life. Returning to her grandmother’s house, Nelly finds that ‘big’ Marion has returned, and the two embrace as they say each other’s names. In Sciamma’s hands, the utterly engaging ordinariness of Nelly and ‘little’ Marion’s play and interaction has the power of a magic spell enabling Nelly to deal with the grief behind her mother Marion’s absence, which allows them to bond anew.

Philosopher and paediatrician as well as psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott theorized ‘play’ and ‘playing’ during the final stage of his career, writings collected in Playing and Reality (1971). For Winnicott, play takes place in a transitional, intersubjective space that is neither inner (psychic) nor external reality, and is equivalent to cultural experience: play is creative and associated with developmental growth and health. Film scholars Vicky Lebeau and Annette Kuhn have already connected Winnicott’s thinking to film in fascinating and fruitful ways, and adding his theorization of play to this body of work will extend and enrich it. Furthermore, in an essay called ‘Cinema and Child’s Play’ written for the collection accompanying the translation of Belgian phenomenologist Jean-Pierre Meunier’s 1969 book The Structures of the Film Experience: Filmic Identification, Jennifer Barker draws on Meunier’s book, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s child psychology, and the writings of developmental psychologist Daniel Stern to bring out the remarkable parallels between children’s game-playing and film spectatorship. Barker’s juxtaposition and paralleling of Meunier’s account of different modes of cinematic identification with Stern’s ‘forms-of-vitality-play’ brings out the similarities between the two activities disclosed by phenomenological description. In this essay, therefore, I shall draw on Winnicott’s theorizing of play, Barker’s essay, Merleau-Ponty’s child psychology and Meunier’s book in order to conduct a psychologically-informed phenomenology of the play(ing) undertaken in and by Sciamma’s fantastic tale.