We become our mothers: The Eternal Daughter vs Petite maman

• Spoiler warning: This article gives away elements of the plots.

In Joanna Hogg’s new film The Eternal Daughter (which just played at the BFI London Film Festival), Tilda Swinton plays two characters: a filmmaker named Julie and Julie’s mother Rosalind. The two women take a holiday together to a secluded hotel, where they appear to be the only guests. Julie wants to make a film about her relationship with her mother. 

The Eternal Daughter is a companion piece to Hogg’s The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021), and all three draw on her experiences as a filmmaker, as a woman and as a daughter. Her filmic alter ego is named Julie Hart; in the Souvenir movies she was played by Swinton’s daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne. Swinton steps into the role here, playing an older Julie, besides reprising the role of Rosalind, which she also played in the previous films.

I make references to the previous films and Hogg’s casting choices for a deliberate reason. These decisions go beyond Hogg’s long-term working relationship with the Swintons. By casting Swinton in both roles in The Eternal Daughter, Hogg is commenting on selfhood and motherhood in unusual ways. Indeed, it’s not simply the casting that suggests this, but also the way Hogg has conceived of her scenes.

Despite travelling together and staying in the same room, Rosalind and Julie are almost never in the same frame. Hogg and cinematographer Ed Rutherford seem to indicate that Rosalind and Julie are the same person by capitalising on our knowledge that they are played by the same actor: the only way they could appear in the same frame is through digital enhancement. There is no reality in which these two women could occupy the same space – because they are the same woman.

Why is it important to see them as the same woman, though? As I watched The Eternal Daughter, I was repeatedly reminded of Céline Sciamma’s Petite maman (2021), which also explores this question. It’s a tiny fable about a lonely little girl who meets another little girl in a forest and eventually comes to realise that her new friend is really the child version of her mother. Sciamma made a casting choice akin to Hogg’s: the two girls are played by twin actors, Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz. The sisters are identical and so the two girls in the film, Nelly and (her mother) Marion, are also presented as being identical to each other. In The Eternal Daughter, Swinton is outfitted and made up very differently depending on whether she is playing Rosalind or Julie; but the Sanz twins have the same hair and face, and are playing characters who are the same age. Sciamma makes no effort to erase their sameness.

Significantly, though, neither Sciamma nor Hogg comments on the identical looks of her characters, leaving this open to us to interpret. In Petite maman, Nelly and Marion’s relationship plays on the tendency we have as children to develop imaginary friendships. Marion simply appears out of nowhere and lives in a house exactly like Nelly’s; the two of them seem to inhabit a world together that’s separate from Nelly’s lived reality. Further, it shows us how we wonder about the parts of our parents’ lives we can never witness: especially their childhoods. Nelly has questions she can’t put to the present-day, grown-up Marion, so she puts them to her child-mother.

Their indistinguishability also suggests another idea: Nelly and Marion are, perhaps, the same person. In her imagination, Nelly meets a version not just of her mother but also of herself. When we conduct conversations with our imaginary friends in our heads, we’re really conversing with ourselves and learning the eternally useful skill of stepping into someone else’s shoes. When Nelly conjures up a child version of her mother, she has no reference by which to do this and so she casts herself as the image.

This is just an early expression of the truth we all learn when we become parents: we become our parents. Where once we vowed never to say things our parents said to us, we later find ourselves saying them unthinkingly to our children. We surprise ourselves by seeing the value in our parents’ actions. And so we become them, we are them. 

Both Hogg and Sciamma underline this in their films through their casting, by presenting their mother and daughter characters as identical in looks. And Hogg emphasises their overlapping by allowing only one of them to be seen at a time. Eventually, in The Eternal Daughter, we are shown that Julie is on her own in the hotel and that her mother might not have been on the trip at all. She may even be dead. 

Julie’s efforts to make a film about her mother are illustrated in her conjuring of Rosalind in her own image, just as – in Petite maman – Nelly’s efforts to get to know her mother are brought to life by her conjuring of Marion. The daughters find their mothers in themselves.

The Eternal Daughter screened at the 66th BFI London Film Festival. A UK release date has yet to be announced.

Now in its fifth year, the LFF Critics Mentorship Programme continues to look at how we can better serve writers from underrepresented communities. It offers an opportunity for emerging critics to develop their film writing skills and have a chance to be mentored by industry media professionals in order to help pave the way to future opportunities for paid work in the media.

This year six mentees took part in an intensive four-day programme of screenings and events at the start of the festival, mentored both as a group by co-lead mentors Akua Gyamfi (founder, The British Blacklist) and Amon Warmann (contributing editor, Empire, co-host Fade To Black) as well as being individually paired with LFF media partners at Empire, The Face, Little White Lies, Sight and Sound, Screen and Time Out for one-on-one mentoring and to help produce pieces of film journalism for their portfolio.

The mentees had full access to press screenings and events throughout the festival to write reviews and features, plus additional interview access with filmmakers and an array of guest speaker sessions and opportunities to network.