Little Mother: I'D Like To Try My Best To Meet You Again

Liu Ying / Wen

Although she failed in the award ceremony of the Berlin Film Festival just concluded, Celine siama's new work "little mother" has conquered the critics and the audience with her female film's unique firmness and tenderness, which has become the biggest legacy of this film festival. For the Chinese audience, this story, with a little girl going back to time and space and reuniting with her mother in a parallel world, shares a similar theme with "Hello, Li Huanying", which is a hit in the Spring Festival. Therefore, it will inevitably be compared by domestic film critics and arouse the audience's curiosity.

The year before last, Celine sianma, a French director who received much attention in Cannes with her "portrait of a burning woman", has been working hard and groping for a long time in the creation of women's films. "Little mother" abandons the warm and radical attitude of the previous works and returns to the simple state. Instead, it observes and realizes those uncertain moments in life from the perspective of children's innocence. From the nursing home, the little girl Nelly hugs the old people one by one. Her grandmother had just passed away here, and her mother Marion came with her to collect her grandmother's remains. Immediately, the two returned to their old house in the village, where my grandmother used to live and where my mother spent her childhood and youth. Nelly's father is here to meet his mother and daughter. He seems absent-minded, but he still tries to cooperate as much as he can to get everything right. Marion was sullen because of her excessive grief. One morning, she disappeared. Nelly did not know how long her mother would leave, but she did not care too much about her mother's running away from home. In the process of playing alone, she walked into a forest and met a girl who looked almost exactly like her, and this new friend also had the same name as her mother: Marion. Nelly and little Marion soon had a good time. They invited each other to their home. On her first visit, Nelly was surprised to find that little Marion's home was exactly the same as her parents.

This "surprise", more precisely, comes from the mood of the audience in front of the screen. Nelly in the film, with her childlike innocence, doesn't stare at it. She just crossed into another world, so what? Children's world is full of incredible ideas, not so many rules and regulations in the adult world. Not only did little Marion have the same name as her mother, she even dressed as if she were carved out of a mold. She is Nelly's mother, she represents the past, and Nelly comes from the future! So, in this lush forest, Nelly completed the time travel, chatting and playing with her childhood mother. She even met her middle-aged grandmother in her little mother's house. At that time, her legs and feet were not very flexible, indicating the disease after her old age. In this way, Nelly looked back at her mother's youth and enjoyed her intimate relationship with her as a friend.

With a children's film, xi'anma shot the most precious and ideal relationship between the two generations. With a few strokes, the film outlines the cottages and woods, which are subtracting to the greatest extent in the setting, but constantly push the purest emotion to the climax. Nelly in the film is brave. Because she is eager to be close to her mother, she breaks the barrier of time beyond reality. In other words, like the curious children in fairy tales, she finds a wonderful world beyond herself after falling into the rabbit hole.

As a steady style art film, "little mother" is more difficult, but the valuable thing is that it can render feelings quietly. The director does not want to instill sensational soup into the audience, but creates moving moments with long silence and gaze. Nelly and Marion are both mother and daughter and friends. When Marion knows that Nelly comes from the future, she just calmly says, "you know my future." At this moment, the traditional power relationship between mother and daughter no longer exists, and the mother has no secret in front of her daughter. For the director, creating such a story that breaks through the boundary between reality and fantasy may be just to create an opportunity to build a corridor with the film and meet his dearest ones in some way.