Wednesday, May 25, 2022 — 3 
 
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

‘Petite Maman’ is a real-life 
fantasy

Celine Sciamma’s “Portrait of a 
Lady on Fire” was the first French 
film I ever watched. I had never 
thought that a film with sparse 
dialogue and devoid of a score could 
make me feel so many things. It was 
unlike anything I had ever watched 
before and I knew then that I was 
watching an artist’s masterpiece. It 
came as no surprise that Sciamma’s 
“Petite Maman” rocketed to the top 
of my movie list the second it was 
released. I watched “Petite Maman” 
at a nearly empty screening at Ann 
Arbor’s State Theatre, and yet I 
hardly noticed my solitude. 
“Petite Maman” follows Nelly 
(Joséphine Sanz, debut), an 8-year-
old girl who has just lost her 
grandmother. Nelly and her parents 
return to clean out the house that her 
mother grew up in. In typical 8-year-
old fashion, Nelly’s curiosity leads her 
to explore the house and the woods 
behind it, and she meets a girl of the 
same age named Marion, (Gabrielle 
Sanz, debut) with whom she has 
an instant and strangely familiar 
connection. Their connection is made 

even more intriguing, given that 
Marion looks identical to Nelly and 
shares a name with Nelly’s mother. It 
is a story of grief, friendship and love 
through a child’s eyes. 
Sciamma’s style is at the forefront 
in this movie, as she once again 
relies on silent scenes and sounds of 
nature to convey emotion. It’s a film 
about a child, yet it’s not a children’s 
film. Nelly reminded me so much of 
myself as a kid. She conducts herself 
the way you would expect an 8-year-
old to — full of curiosity and eager to 
explore — but she’s also introspective 
and quiet. She doesn’t quite say what 
she’s feeling to anyone, yet with 
every scene, you can tell exactly 
what she’s thinking. This speaks 
to the astounding performance of 
Joséphine Sanz as well as her twin, 
Gabrielle Sanz, who plays Marion 
with the same force of personality. 
Sciamma excels in portraying the 
view of the world that we all had 
in childhood: one where the days 
consisted of exploration and asking 
questions, there are no inhibitions 
and you can make a new friend by 
helping them build a treehouse, no 
introductions necessary.

SWARA RAMASWAMY
Daily Arts Writer

How TikTok won my silly little queer heart

For a very long time, I was 
insistent on leaving TikTok to the 
kids. I’m only 21, but as somebody 
who had to conduct a few Google 
searches 
to 
make 
sense 
of 
Instagram stories, I simply felt 
too old for TikTok. I finally caved 
when the jobs I was browsing 
on Handshake (you know the 
struggle) 
were 
asking 
about 
TikTok experience and fluency: 
I thought to myself, “TikTok 
CANNOT be the reason I don’t get 
a job.” 
I reluctantly made an account, 
belaboring to create a funny and 
clever username for far too long 
(and I finally made one, albeit 
not one that I will flaunt in an 
interview for a grown-up job), and 
began exploring the app. It was 
relatively easy to use, with the 
homepage including two streams 
of content, one from TikTokers 
(rolling my eyes as I type this 
word) you follow and another, 
the For You page, containing 
recommended content based on 
your follows, views and searches. 
The Discover, Create, Inbox and 
Profile pages were also relatively 

self-explanatory. I was quickly 
immersed in a flurry of “We Don’t 
Talk about Bruno” videos that 
got old fast, and TikToks using 
“Misery” as background audio 
to make fun of life’s rougher 
moments that felt a little more 
my speed. Still, over the first few 
days, the app failed to hold my 
attention, and I abandoned my 
project as quickly as I had taken 

it up.
Then the winter semester came 
to an end, and I found myself in 
that 
post-finals-pre-summer-
job limbo. I considered another 

possibility: Maybe TikTok didn’t 
objectively suck, and I simply 
hadn’t properly invested the care, 
time and energy to cultivate a 
stream of content that I enjoyed. 
This possibility was an exciting 
one; I’ve held the rest of my social 
media accounts for five or more 
years each. Maybe I had inundated 
their algorithms with too much 
information — or at least too much 

information representative of a 
person I no longer see when I look 
in the mirror. 

EMMY SNYDER
Daily Arts Writer

Design by Jennie Vang

‘Come Home the Kids Miss You’ is catchy but unremarkable

When Jack Harlow first emerged 
onto the rap scene in 2015, his intangible 
qualities such as his swagger and 
trademark Southern twang worked to 
set him apart from the rest of the crop 
of rising wordsmiths. Harlow and his 
Louisville-based 
collective, 
Private 
Garden, were very much outsiders. As 
a goofy-looking, curly-haired white kid 
from Kentucky, Harlow was often not 
taken seriously within the rap game, 
and he had to earn all of the respect he 
has garnered since. Clips and songs from 
his adolescence show how dedicated 
he has been to rapping as a craft since 
he was a young boy. His major label 
debut mixtape, 2018’s Loose, and his 
subsequent project, 2019’s Confetti, 
display this hunger. In these first two 
albums, Harlow sounds raw, composed 
and in touch with Louisville’s underrated 
hip-hop scene. His beats skew towards 
the eclectic and psychedelic, and his 
natural swagger in the two tapes is 
apparent to listeners, as his cadence and 
delivery were remarkably far along for a 
rapper as young as he was then. 

In 2020, Harlow released the single 
that turned him into a household name, 
“WHATS 
POPPIN.” 
Harlow 
fans 
rejoiced that Louisville’s favorite son 
was finally getting recognized by a more 
mainstream audience, but the song itself 
signified a shift in Harlow’s sonic profile 
from intricate, lush instrumentals to 
basic trap beats. 
This shift is quite apparent in his most 
recent release: the highly anticipated 
Come Home the Kids Miss You. The two 
singles that preceded the album, “Nail 
Tech” and the Fergie-sampling “First 
Class,” were catchy, if a little boring. The 
hunger that you could hear in Harlow’s 
voice on Loose and Confetti is all but 
gone, and it seems like the trappings 
of life as a mega-star have tapered his 
creativity and drive. His intent now 
seems to be making inoffensive radio-
rap fodder — a major deviation from 
his previous work. While he previously 
made melodic rap tracks, that aspect 
of his repertoire has definitely been 
emphasized as Harlow’s commercial 
focus shifted towards hunting for 
streams. Where Harlow’s whiteness 
previously served as a detriment to his 
career in the local scene, the mountain-
moving national PR push that he has 

benefitted from since the release of 
“WHATS POPPIN” is in no small part 
due to his “marketability” (see: white 
privilege).
This negative transformation isn’t 
just a product of his aim to add more 
melody to his albums, as previous R&B-
influenced tracks, like Confetti’s “THRU 
THE NIGHT,” work brilliantly. Harlow 
still has a ton of natural talent; at times 
on this new project, his swagger and 
flow mitigates his poor writing and basic 
production choices. He also has a good 
sense of humor and a rare boldness and 
confidence for a rapper of his stature. 
When these intangibles come to the 
forefront, the album is at its best, such 
as on the shameless DM-slide of “Dua 
Lipa” and the breezy “Lil Secret,” which 
has the best beat on the project — a 
smooth, vocals-centered instrumental. 
“Like a Blade of Grass” also sounds like 
something that could’ve been on Loose 
or Confetti, with its bouncy drums 
reminiscent of early Harlow gems like 
“SUNDOWN,” though it would have 
been better if he didn’t try to sing on 
it. He’s not off-key or anything, but his 
singing lacks the signature Kentucky lilt 
that makes his rapping so endearing. 
In general, Harlow spends way 

too much of the album trying to be 
something he’s not. He gives a half-
hearted Drake impression on “Churchill 
Downs,” a track that also features the 
Canadian rapper. Drake sounds more 
natural than Harlow on the song, but he 
still isn’t excellent. Harlow has shown 

that his collaborations with talented 
singers can be brilliant, like Confetti’s 
stellar 
2forwOyNE 
collaboration, 
“WARSAW,” but his own crooning 

tends to fall flat on Come Home the Kids 
Miss You. While his career may be in a 
better place than it was three years ago, 
his music has deteriorated. Without the 
example of his early work, Harlow seems 
alarmingly similar to industry plants in 
other genres, like Billie Eilish, GAYLE 

or Iann Dior. At least Eilish still can lean 
back on her unique voice and world-class 
songwriter of a brother; Harlow just 
sounds uninspired.

RYAN BRACE
Daily Arts Writer

This image is from the official album cover of “Come Home the Kids Miss You,” owned by 
Generation Now/Atlantic Recording Corporation

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Read more at michigandaily.com