Gone Girl, Part 1

PETITE MAMAN (A) - It's a toss-up as to what is more appealing here -- the execution of this movie about a little girl meeting the child version of her own mother, or merely the existence of the simple idea itself. Either way, writer-director Celine Sciamma once again delves into the young female experience with sharp insights.

Sciamma's previous two features -- "Girlhood" and "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" -- provide intimate details about the lives of teens and young women and how they interact. Here, she reaches back to age 8 and has an absolute treasure in little Josephine Sanz, who plays Nelly, a thoughtful and observant girl who internalizes the awkward relationships of the adults around her.

The film opens on Nelly saying a series of goodbyes as she goes door-to-door visiting people in the nursing home where her grandmother has just died. She's sad that she didn't get to say goodbye to her grandmother. Next, Nelly and her mother (Nina Meurisse) are off to grandma's home to tend to the old lady's house and things. To bide her time, Nelly goes off to play in the woods. It's there that she meets another girl her age, Marion, who looks very much like her (Marion is played by Sanz's sister, Gabrielle). 

The trailer and the title tip us off that Nelly has gone back in time and found her mother, who lives in a mirror version of the grandmother's house, down to the cane that the grandmother used until her death, even back when she was in her 30s, when we see an alternate version of her (played by Margot Abascale). Nelly drinks in this alternate universe, watching her 8-year-old mother cope with her own depressive mother.

What a gift it would be to, as a child, get to know a parent when they were that same impressionable age. What shaped them? Did they eventually turn into their own parents? How can we use that intel to deal with them in the present day? In the wrong hands, such a concept would be treated like a gimmick, open to sci-fi tricks and cheap gags. Not here.

Sciamma resists every urge to exploit her brilliant idea, settling instead for quiet observation. And she is blessed to have Josephine Sanz, who carries the movie with cool confidence. She has a way of holding a gaze while she drinks in what has just happened or what has just been said to her, as the wheels in her brain spin. She eventually evolves from dumbstruck to enlightened over the span of the film's spare 73 minutes.

At one point in the few days that pass, Nelly's mother -- perhaps overwhelmed by the task of reconciling the grandmother's life -- disappears, and Nelly's kind father (Stephane Varupenne) looks after Nelly. Through their interactions, Nelly picks out more pieces of the puzzle that is her mother. 

Nelly can come off, alternatively, as timid and precocious. Early in the film, as she sits in the back seat during the drive to grandmother's house, she reaches up to the driver's seat and feeds snacks to her mother. It's a sweet moment -- a little girl nurturing her mother -- and it sets the tone for what plays out there in the woods and in her mother's childhood home. 

It's all incredibly sweet but never saccharine. By the end of this adventure, there will be certain reconciliations, but you hope that little Nelly will have absorbed enough inside dope to break a few nagging habits in the generational cycle going forward.