Review: Sublime Female Vision and 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire'
“You may forget, but
Let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us”
Sappho, The Art of Loving Women
Director Celine Sciamma frames Portrait of a Lady on Fire with such nuance and breathtaking emotional revelation that it could be the first and only romance on film. The sense of quiet fervency she instills in her characters is perfectly condensed into the question, “do all lovers feel they're inventing something?”
Marianne’s (Noémie Merlant) arrival on the rugged isle of Brittany is choppy, and her commission unexpected: she is to paint a young noblewoman who refuses to have her likeness captured for a potential suitor. Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) believes Marianne has come to serve as companion for walks, all the while Marianne memorizes each detail of her face to illustrate in secret, the artist’s attention to detail for her subject’s thoughts, quirks, and desires coalescences into something much more heated.
A film with such a focus on artistry runs the risk of loosing its emotional connection, especially in the case of a remote period piece. Sciamma, however, seizes every opportunity to imbue Portrait with aching passion. Found in deeply resonate language, each word of Sciamma’s screenplay is meticulously chosen, delivering a distinct sense of prose even in subtitles. Most scenes are unadorned by score, making its presence swell with raw feeling. With cinematic master Claire Mathon behind the camera, the visual elegance is appropriately discernible as high art. Mathon works in simple strokes that unite the impressionistic broadness of the natural world with the soft interior of two human beings as close as they can possibly be. As the women’s trepidation is overcome by emboldening affection, the camera is privileged into their most private moments.
The entirety of the film is rooted in the concept of perspective, and specifically that of a woman. Their penetrating gazes convey a wordless understanding as intellectual equals. Marianne understands Héloïse's reluctance to sit for a portrait is her rejection of literal objectification, to be turned into a gift for a faraway man she cares nothing for. Upon Heloise’s discovery of Marianne’s true purpose, her decision to instead sit for the portrait perfectly captures Sciamma’s feminist ideology. What Marianne decides to paint is much more about Héloïse’s personality, a collection of her habits and unique qualities. She is reproducing Héloïse’s personhood, rather than reducing it, a sentiment captured in Sciamma’s interview with Advocate,
The isle is a fantasy of a secret world only for women, with all its safety, freedom, and comfort. They are at liberty to have sex, speak their minds, seek abortions, and pursue creative pastimes, concealed and protected by the untamed waves. It calls to mind the Greek island of Lesbos, where centuries ago Sappho composed lyrical poetry inspired by her female lovers and originated the term lesbian. The outside world could scarcely catch a glimpse, if it wasn’t already turning a blind eye. In fact, Portrait is historic in its portrayal of such freedoms, as they have not before been recognized in art. These things that certainly happened stayed in the shadows because the experiences of female artists weren’t legitimized beyond their time. Portrait is by women and for women, past and present, to return to a female utopia erased from art.
The burning warmth that radiates between the two of them is only stoked by its impermanence, cursed by the inevitability that it will eventually be smothered. The reframing of the Orpheus, the figure whose choice to look back on his wife as he led her from the Underworld sealed her fate in death myth is central in conversation between the two. They know they are meant for this replaying of Greek tragedy, and the narrative adds to the film’s theory of what it means to be looked at, and to look back. Héloïse interprets it as his decision to have the memory of Eurydice, rather than a ghost of the real person. Marianne’s impression of Héloïse is transient, only developed in stolen time. The myth informs the choice not to remember a relationship with regret, but to look back with love. Oil paint takes the form of preservation of being, memory set to canvas, overtaking reality.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire will join the echelons of queer period pieces that recreate narratives lost and unseen while also building one of the most ravishing romances of recent memory. Do not mistake its slow burn for a gentle, comforting heat. It’s searing, agonizing, exquisite, and it will leave scars of the internal kind.
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Supplementals:
Another Sapphic period piece worth viewing is The Handmaiden, from South Korea. Though more erotic thriller than pure romance, auteur Park Chan-Wook’s eye for aesthetics is matched by his talent for subversive storytelling.
Listen to Celine Sciamma herself discuss her creative process and inspiration for Portrait in an interview for The Big Picture podcast (beginning at 56:38).
