Writer-director Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman departs from the filmmaker’s last two feature-length directorial efforts in its comparative modesty. With none of the overt social messaging of Girlhood or the grand romance of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma’s precisely composed images and muted dialogue serve a more intimate story about the longing to connect with one’s mother outside the bounds of the parent-offspring relationship.

Petite Maman indulges the same kind of fantasy as Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future, answering the question of what it would be like to meet our parents at our own age—though it’s not overly concerned with temporal paradoxes or a high-stakes race to ensure one’s genesis. Rather, Sciamma’s film is contemplative and cool almost to a fault, emphasizing the simple acts of connecting with and parting from people we care about, and the rueful inevitability of time’s passing.