This past Saturday, Feb. 29, the Hamilton College Film Club screened
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
(2019) in the Kirner-Johnson Red Pit.
Portrait
, Céline Sciamma’s fourth film as a writer-director, is set in 18th-century French Bretagne. We first meet protagonist Marianne (Noémie Merlant) teaching figure drawing to art students in Paris. One of her students stumbles upon an earlier painting of Marianne’s — a nighttime image of a woman whose dress is hemmed with flames — and this painting becomes a portal to the past.
Through the portrait, we are transported back to Marianne’s stormy arrival at a remote Bretagne residence where she is to paint former convent girl Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). Héloïse’s countess mother (Valeria Golino) intends to send the painting to a Milanese nobleman: if he approves, her daughter will be wed and they will both be transported to a new life. But Héloïse has no desire to be married and has already rejected one painter who left without ever seeing her face. Marianne, who has been brought here on the pretext of being a chaperone and companion, must study and paint her subject in secret, looking without appearing to look.
This deception is, unsurprisingly, revealed quickly — the electric tension between the pair prevents either from keeping secrets for long. Yet when confronted with Marianne’s first attempt to paint her likeness, Héloïse is appalled. “Is that how you see me?” she demands, less stunned by Marianne’s deceit than by the lack of life and “presence” in her picture. “The fact that it isn’t close to me, that I can understand,” she says bitterly, “But I find it sad it isn’t close to you.”
What follows is an erotic study of power and passion in which the observed becomes the observer and the authored becomes the author, returning time and again to a central question: “If you look at me, who do I look at?” This question is repeated throughout Sciamma’s film, which rightly won the Cannes prize for Best Screenplay last year. We see it integrated into a historically accurate discussion of the way the art world keeps women in their place by prohibiting the objects of the female gaze.
This question also informs an ongoing debate about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. “He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s,” Marianne says of Orpheus and his decision to look back as he ascends from the underworld. But perhaps that decision was not his to make: could Eurydice be the author of her own fate, the commander of his gaze?
Filmed in painterly hues by cinematographer Claire Mathion,
Portrait
seamlessly intertwines themes of love and politics with representation and reality. At times it plays like a breathless romance, teeming with passionate anticipation. In other places, it is a sociopolitical statement, what Sciamma has called “a manifesto about the female gaze.” Ghostly images of Héloïse in her wedding dress create a gothic feel, and there’s something Wuthering Heights-esque in the cliffside walks she embraces with abandon. Yet Sciamma is careful to keep such heightened emotions and aesthetics rooted in social realism. A subplot about young maid Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) dealing with an unwanted pregnancy finds Sciamma at her most quietly radical — confronting a taboo subject, refusing to look away, and finding strength among other women.
Musically, Sciamma keeps things sparse and diegetic, mirroring Héloïse’s sheltered experience and sense of imprisonment. It is all the more significant when a pivotal scene bursts into vibrant song — a chorus of live vocals and handclaps that lifts the film into a dream-like trance, as mesmerizingly magical as anything I can remember seeing on a screen.
