Michael's Movie Grade: A+
A near perfect family film from France.
With movies like Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2017), Tomboy (2011) and Girlhood (2014), director/writer Céline Sciamma has proven herself as one of the finest current filmmakers. This movie may be one of her best. While it may be very intelligent, it is at the same time a really simple film. When you have the great idea of a young girl meeting her mother as a young girl and them becoming best friends, you don't need any complexities or plot twists or villains. Instead just watching this friendship unfold and see how the two interact with each other is fantastic. There is a real heart and charm to this relationship and many of the best scenes are the simplest. Céline Sciamma has a real talent from capturing the littlest moments in life. So much of the joy of watching this movie is in simply seeing all the little moments of childhood captured so perfectly. This involves the little things that kids do that many filmmakers don't even pay attention to. Watching them playing with their food or trying to make food themselves or building themselves a little hut. There is an unexplainable magic to seeing kids just be kids in a movie. This is not to say this movie does not delve into any deep questions though. This movie looks at the grief at the loss of a loved one and how this can effect the kids in the person experiencing that griefs life. The fact that this is viewed not from the point of view of the one experiencing the grief but instead her young daughter is brilliant and causes us to look at such a situation completely differently from how most films would. As it is viewed from the eyes of a child the look at this situation can feel simple, but in reality it is never dumbed down or simplified. Instead the dialogue doesn't directly discuss the physiological impact on the characters, but instead it is something we are forced to infer and think about for ourselves. Yet this look at grief does not take away from how charming and often funny so many of the little moments in this film can be. When this movie ended, it made me sad because I simply didn't want it to end. I wanted to live in this world and spend more time with the characters. That is truly a sign of a great film.
This is one of the finest family movies I have seen in theaters in quite some time, and if you love movies this film is simply a must see.
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