The Director You're Sleeping On

Celine Sciamma has been making quietly revolutionary French cinema for over a decade, but her name still does not register with most American film audiences. The director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Tomboy, and Petite Maman creates films of extraordinary visual beauty and emotional precision.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire, her 2019 masterpiece, is a period romance set in 18th-century Brittany between a painter and her subject. The film constructs its love story almost entirely through the act of looking. It is one of the most visually articulate films about desire ever made.

Petite Maman, her 2021 follow-up, is a 72-minute film about an eight-year-old girl who meets her mother as a child. The premise is fantastical, but the execution is grounded in everyday childhood details.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire contains almost no music. Two pieces in total: a chorus sung a cappella by women around a bonfire, and Vivaldi at the very end, which is why that final shot flattens people who thought they were watching a quiet period film. Strip the score out of a romance and every look has to carry the weight instead. Sciamma made that trade knowingly.

Sciamma directorial style is defined by restraint. She uses natural light, minimal score, and long takes. The filmmaking is invisible, which paradoxically makes it more powerful.

Claire Mathon shot both Portrait and Petite Maman, and the gap between them tells you what Sciamma is after. Portrait is candlelight, firelight and grey Atlantic weather. Petite Maman is autumn daylight in a wood, framed at the eye level of an eight-year-old so adults are routinely cropped at the shoulder. Same collaborator, opposite palettes, identical restraint.

Her work with child actors is particularly notable. In Tomboy and Petite Maman, she directs performances from children that feel uncoached and natural.

She writes for other directors too, which is the part most people miss. She wrote My Life as a Courgette, the stop-motion film about a children's home directed by Claude Barras, nominated for the animated feature Oscar in 2017. She also co-wrote Being 17 for Andre Techine. Both are worth an evening and neither looks like her own work.

Explore her filmography through the Criterion Collection at https://www.criterion.com.

The two girls in Petite Maman are played by Josephine and Gabrielle Sanz, real twin sisters, which solves the resemblance problem without a single visual effect and explains the ease between them.

The runtimes are the argument for starting tonight. Petite Maman is 72 minutes. Tomboy is 82. Portrait is 122 and the longest thing she has made. Her entire reputation fits inside about four and a half hours. Begin with Petite Maman if you are sceptical, because it is over before any resistance to art-house cinema has time to set in.

Sciamma is the director you recommend to friends who think they do not like art-house cinema. Her films are accessible, emotionally generous, and short enough to watch in a single sitting.