Por ait de la Jeune Fille en Feu

PORTRAIT DE LA JEUNE FILLE EN FEU:

A C O M P L E T E R E V I E W BY
A L K I M E R K A N TA N R I G Ü N V E R D İ

We’ve known for a long time that looking is

dangerous. Think back, for example, to the Greek
myth of Orpheus, who journeyed to the underworld to
plead for the return of his dead wife, Eurydice. Hades,
the god of the underworld, allowed Eurydice to follow
Orpheus back to the world of the living, but delimited
Orpheus’s sight: if he turned back to look at her, he
would lose her forever. Orpheus looked and was
punished with the kind of loss that cracks you open.
With Portrait de la jeune lle en feu (Portrait of a Lady
on Fire, 2019), Sciamma jumps into the shimmering
waters of the period lm and became the rst woman
to win the Queer Palm Award at Cannes. It is a picture
that is unusually dominated by a single gure of
cinematic style: physical poise and stillness,
exempli ed in the xity of a gaze. Coincidentally, it’s
one of two new lms that depend heavily on the play
of the eye; the other is “The Irishman.” Both lms
deploy the gaze dramatically, as a mode of action,
and historically, as a distillation of the time and place
in which the movie is set. The feminine masquerade
of 18th-century corseted dresses and rules of
propriety gives a novel edge to Sciamma’s rendering
of utopian spaces inhabited by women, through a
mise en abyme of the female gaze, the unbearable yet
dangerous kind of which, in the history of
representation. Saturated with the emotional colors of
actresses Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant, which
materialized onto the cinematic canvas via
cinematographer Claire Mathon’s brush made of
natural and candlelight, Sciamma’s palette paints a
picture of desire so vivid it elicits a physical reaction
laced with sensuality on those who admire it. They

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gave the lm the luscious, tactile beauty of an oil

painting. Kitchen scenes have the tender earthiness
of Chardin still lifes; landscapes on the rocky, blustery
coasts combine autumnal, dying- re hues with the
otherworldly mists of sea spray. The lm confronts the
viewer as a perfectionist when it comes to small
details. Sciamma worked with Thomas Grezaud for
the set design and the costume design by Dorothee
Guiraud. The fact that in this pre-industrialized era,
each of the female characters has only one or two
dresses each, although more high-borne Heloise has
maybe three or so, not counting the emerald-green
silk gown she wears for her portrait (The work has
shown, excellent in its way, is all painted by artist
Helene Delmaire, whose brushwork is a little freer and
looser than typical French portraiture of the period,
although that airier, 19th-century quality could be
interpreted as a sign that Marianne is ahead of her
time. But instead of focusing on the remarkable
aspects of the lm, there was a barrage of criticism
among the cognoscenti based on the miscorrect
brushstroke technique in the painting from the 18th
century, ignoring the ahead-of-time and
“contemporary interpretations of the technique.) Much
attention is given to clothes themselves too:
Marianne’s one dress of rust-red wool; Héloïse’s dark-
green silk, and the wedding gown that haunts both
women, a ghostly premonition of the future. There is a
duel of gazes, a battle of subtle exchanges where no
one easily surrenders until the embers of passion are
just too feverish to resist—all, thankfully, without a
single man in sight to crowd their frame or hinder their
revelry.

The title of writer-director Céline Sciamma’s (Tomboy,

Girlhood) latest work, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (A
more literal translation from French Portrait de la Jeune
Fille en Feu means Portrait of a Young Lady on Fire) ,
obviously has multiple meanings. First and foremost, it
refers to an actual portrait that the main protagonist

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paints. But it also denotes the lm itself as a cinematic

study of the lady in question, Heloise (Adelé Haenel
from BPM, and the supreme object of desire in
Sciamma’s rst feature, Water Lilies), whose owing
gown catches re at one point, as if the love and
desire she feels for Marianne has made her brocade
frock spontaneously combust. The period lm starts
as a story about looking, but its heart lies in less
obvious, more suggestive cinematic elements. Period
pieces often revel in their periodicity, measuring
themselves in terms of an “authentic” relationship to
dress, speech, and behavior. Though Portrait of Lady
on Fire is set in the 18th century, it never for a
moment feels like a period piece, but rather a close
analog for our contemporary period transposed
outside time. The rst scene of the picture features
Marianne (Noémie Merlant) informing her students to
draw her in what appears to be a painting class while
wearing, a then-familiar green velvety dress and a
curious student asking about a painting which is
eloquent to Marianne as it is seen from her smoky
glances when it is mentioned. When this non-
exhumed memory of the lover emerges through this
brief interaction, the scene instantly shifts to the arrival
of her on a small Brittany island by boat and her
luggage (including her blank canvases) falls into the
water, and she is the one to retrieve them, without the
help of the boatman. He will be the last man seen on
screen (except for some dim gures of peasants at
dusk), until the last two sequences: self-assured
“connoisseurs” in an Art Salon, and patrons in a
concert hall. In a more traditional tale, Marianne, as a
non-aristocratic painter, could so easily have been a
Jane Eyre-style symbol of powerlessness, but right
from the start, as she jumps o the boat to rescue her
oating canvases, Sciamma makes her a more radical
presence. Utopia de nes an improbable space, and
the one crafted by Sciamma is no heaven. It is neatly
framed like a classical painting, with an o -screen
masculine presence encasing it. Marianne has a task,

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a task that has a suspenseful, gothic quality; she

must surveil Héloïse, steal glances, and paint the
portrait in secret. The countess (Valeria Golino),
summoned Marianne as a paid companion —paid
companions to inhabit amongst aristocrat families and
accompanying the members was a common practice
at the time— whose task is to paint her portrait in
secret because Héloïse (Adelé Haenel) does not want
to pose, for the portrait’s purpose is to advertise her to
a potential husband whom she has never met and if
the betrothed likes the painting the marriage will be
executed. Héloïse lives in a huge empty house, where
the unfurnished rooms and stone halls echo with the
crackle of replaces and the rustle of dresses.
Outside, all we hear is the blowing of the wind and the
rushing of the waves. It all feels so lonely and
desolate, and yet throughout the lm, this initially
con ning bleakness transforms into possibility, as we
begin to understand that the emptiness surrounding
Héloïse is a measure of her freedom, not a sign of her
spiritual or marital deprivation. Marianne rst sees
Héloïse in a wandering session around the yard of the
island, from the back, rst with a robe and then with
her blonde hair as the cape slowly falls into her
shoulders. Sciamma waits twenty minutes to
introduce Héloïse, slowly and mathematically building
up the enthusiasm with rst an artist’s failed attempt to
portray her, resulting in a headless tableau and yet
another gothic correlation with once again when we
see Héloïse in a robe. In one interview she says: 

“I really wanted to tell a love story but not escaping this idea of
the rise of desire, how it is buil , how it is born, and ake the
time to look at tha . e rst kiss in the lm happens at an hour
and 21 minutes, which really departs from the romantic comedy
convention. I wanted to depart from this idea of love at rst
sigh , and really try to give this experience to the audience that
they know very well, which is alling in love.”

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Héloïse breaks into a run toward a cli overlooking the

sea. Turning around with piercing emerald eyes: “I’ve
dreamt of that for years,” she says. “To die?” Marianne
asks. “To run,” Héloïse replies. Marianne with her bold
pro le and assertive gaze yet has the air of a beautiful
small animal, an ermine, or a mink. Her eyes are
quick, dark, darting. Héloïse who has the gift of
revealing emotions even as she seems to be
concealing them which gives the movie much of its
crackling energy, is slower, with the dazed look of an
animal bred in captivity. Their very physiques capture
the contrast in the two women’s freedoms and fates.
This is a lm of shapes and textures: the seashell
curve of a perfect pink ear, the sti folds of a brocade
dress, the scratching of charcoal over the crisp cream
paper. Eventually, at the end of the tour, the two sit
side by side on the sand, as Marianne steals glances
at Héloïse, who, along with the camera, steals
glances back at Marianne until they lock in a gaze
sparked by an intoxicating recognition. Marianne
slowly befriends Héloïse, pretending to being here as
simply as a walking companion, while also
clandestinely painting her portrait, a trust exercise
founded on betrayal. But Sciamma wisely underplays
the potential melodrama of this arrangement; Héloïse
is too smart to be taken in so easily, and the lm’s
interests lie elsewhere.

What follows is a love story, one that is thrilling, erotic,

and all the more pleasing for feeling at once strange
and familiar. As Marianne gradually constructs
Héloïse’s likeness from glances stolen during their
strolls, ‘Do all lovers feel they’re inventing something?’
Héloïse asks Marianne. Throughout the lm, we see
erotic and artistic creation are intertwined, built from
looking and being looked at in turn. The plot
incorporates elements of Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith,
Choderlos de Laclos’s novel Dangerous Liaisons and Stephen
Frears’s lm version, and du Maurier’s and Hitchcock’s
Rebecca, as well as the latter’s Vertigo. A gorgeous,

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extended shot of a weeping woman listening to

Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ brings to mind Jonathan Glazer’s
Birth (2004) and Michael Haneke’s e Piano Teacher
(2001). The lm’s compositions, meanwhile, recall
artworks both timely and anachronistic: turning in the
candlelit kitchen, household servant Sophie (Luàna
Bajramı) looks like Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring;
Héloïse, her hair escaping from its pins,
resembles Gerhard Richter’s Betty; a portrait spoiled with
turps becomes a Francis Bacon portrait. Nearly all shots
are as carefully composed and as still as the portrait
Marianne stealthily paints, and the dearth of dissolves
between sequences maintains that decorous
detachment. The love story that Céline constitutes is
subtle and thrilling, at once unsentimental in its
realistic assessment of women’s circumstances and
almost utopian in its celebration of the freedom that is
nonetheless available to them.

Sciamma, the writer and director — her previous

features include “Waterlilies” and “Girlhood” —
practices feminism without dogma or illusion. Even
though this is a world strictly de ned by patriarchy, it is
both a perfect and an unreal place. The love these
women have created is pure and uncompromised,
and Céline’s craftwork takes its cues. She takes as
given the constraints facing Héloïse and Marianne and
the burdens of inequality that a ect Sophie, the young
household servant, but resists the temptations of
melodrama or didacticism. This lm is less a chronicle
of forbidden desire than an examination of how desire
works. Like a lost work of 18th-century literature, it is
at once ardent and rigorous, passionate and
philosophical and what sets this movie apart is that by
looking for equality between its characters, it leaves a
trail of delicately subverted expectations. Part of how it
does this is by embracing the unique dynamics that
are possible when the two people in love are both
women. Albeit the innocent nature of the pure love
story that is being told, Sciamma said that when she

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was showing the script around, she was told that the
lesbian relationship should be a source of con ict;
even Valeria Golino, who played Héloïse’s mother,
suggested that. Sciamma still gets pushed back, she
said, for not showing more of the “taboo of
lesbianism.” But she designed this lm to be cheap (it
cost 4 million euros, she said, or about $4.3 million)
so she wouldn’t have to compromise. And she didn’t.
Golino, Sciamma said, has since changed her mind.

“Even when I, during promotion, would say “lesbians,”

sometimes in the article they would change the word. So what’s
behind this word? I don’t nd it a scary word, but what’s behind
the word? Behind the word is a projec , and I think there’s
something dangerous in that word. We know because Monique
Wittig said that lesbians are not to ally women because they
are escaping a part of the patriarchy, at least domestically or
romantically. And this is very, very subversive and also that’s
why ction has been really harsh on lesbian characters, because
they are seen as dangerous characters.”

Another remarkable and remarked upon aspect of

Portrait is its lack of male characters. For the most
part, men simply do not show up in Portrait, though
this is hardly framed as a feminist triumph; it only
highlights the perversity of a reality in which men may
be absent, but every decision made by the women is
circumscribed concerning men. Queer theorist Eve
Sedgwick gave this structural phenomenon a name in
homosocial desire: how women serve in the
heterosexual union as conduits to strengthen and
legitimize bonds between men. Sophie, the
handmaiden of Héloïse’s family, attempts to induce a
miscarriage before she nally relents to a painful
abortion. Whoever is the man involved in Sophie’s
pregnancy, as is the case for whoever is Héloïse’s
husband-to-be, is beside the point. Not actual men,
but men as a structuring principle haunt the lm’s
gloomy, seaside scenes, as specters of foreclosed,
female possibility.

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Opposed to the Portrait’s stark function,

however, is the incredible, graceful beauty of the
artistic process, if not the result, of portraiture. Close-
ups of paint brushing across the canvas, of hands
hesitating between one and another brushstroke, of
furrowed concentration, of paint-smattered hands—
Portrait elegantly dwells in the incipient particularities
of artistic creation. The work might be mercenary, but
there is an acute, felt joy in capturing speci c
expressions, and lingering in a decision to turn the
brush this or that way. If there is no pleasure to be had
in portraiture’s ultimate end, it only seems to heighten
what pleasure that can be taken, which is in itself, the
creative process—the very same process, no
surprise, in which Héloïse and Marianne fall in love.

Eventually yet inevitably when Héloïse discovers that

Marianne is a painter, what interests her is not the fact
that she could be an object of Marianne’s art – and
eventually Marianne’s desire – but the nature of
Marianne’s gaze, therefore of Marianne’s desire, and,
in a simple leap, of her own. With Marianne’s
confession to Héloïse that she’s been painting a
portrait of hers, being the result of this new
circumstance, there is a transformation of the personal
and the artistic bond—and of Marianne’s art itself,
which, to that point, had been mainly technical and
formal. The women truly come together after they are
on equal footing—when Heloise is aware she is being
painted and wields some control over how she is
being portrayed; when Marianne is no longer hiding
anything and is free to gaze and paint as she
chooses. Héloïse marvels at the fact that Marianne
doesn’t have to marry and gradually starts to trust her.
Sciamma sensitively takes her time before the swell of
passion. With the revelation of Marianne’s artistic
purpose, Héloïse becomes her willing and involved
artistic collaborator—yet their intellectual and creative
collaboration does not dilute the individuality of
Marianne’s artistry but, rather, heightens it. The

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transformation of art from an applied technique to a

vital experience—and a personal passion—is the
drama’s crucial turn, and it inescapably brings to mind
the artistic relationship between director and actor.
Meeting Sciamma, Haenel explains, proved
transformative: “We had a long and beautiful love a air
together, and when I talk about people who saved my
life I begin with her. . . . She was someone who
listened to me . . . who listened to my anger.”
Likewise, Marianne gives Héloïse her undivided
attention—without which no beautiful love a air can
ourish. Sciamma brings this aforementioned
experience to the fore in an extraordinary sequence in
which Héloïse challenges Marianne’s position as the
observer and her place as the observed, and which
gives rise to a simply constructed yet visually intricate
game of gazes and mirrors that resounds with
psychological and creative implications. After
Marianne nishes the portrait and presents to the
countess and her, Héloïse is upset—but not, as we
are expected to think, she is upset because of
Marianne’s betrayal of con dence, Héloïse is upset
because the portrait is bad. It lacks truth. Marianne is
defensive because she knows it is true. The portrait’s
Héloïse has a yielding, false smile as if consenting to
what is asked before it is asked. Marianne smears
over the face with a rag and promises to paint a better
portrait. When Marianne destroys her rst attempt, a
highly polished and conventional work that captures
her subject’s features but none of her personality,
Héloïse agrees to sit: a challenge more than
acquiescence. The sessions are a vehicle for their
wary sparring and mutual fascination; in a key
moment, when Marianne reveals how well she knows
Héloïse’s mannerisms and quirks, the muse turns the
tables, pointing out that while posing she has been
observing the painter just as closely. Sciamma
composes static tableaux featuring Haenel and
Merlant in poses that feel both spontaneous and taut,
rigidly unnatural and utterly authentic. The two

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actresses are relentlessly graceful, endowed with

physical aplomb, contemplative insight, and strong
emotion. The two are a study in contrasts, Marianne’s
dark, sharp features setting o Héloïse’s blonde,
classical beauty. The artist has independence and a
certain masculine swagger—smoking a pipe and, in
an early scene, plunging into the ocean to rescue a
canvas that falls out of a boat. But the convent girl
proves strong-willed, curious, and hungry for
experience and sensation. Neither one is the pursuer
or the seducer; they meet on terms of equality, in their
physical attraction as much as in their intellectual
communion.

Some may feel Sciamma strays into anachronism just

a touch, creating a glimpse of an idealized, classless
matriarchal utopia that’s more wishful thinking than
realist storytelling. But it’s still a beautiful dream,
especially the sequence that sees Heloise take the
lead in creating art, becoming a collaborator with
Marianne instead of just the object of her gaze.
(Students of feminist lm theory are going to be
beside themselves when they see this lm.)

“And as the lm was trying to build a love dialogue with

equality, I also wanted not to play with the buttons of social
hierarchy with the characters. Even though there is a strong
hierarchy, we are not playing with tha . She is never an
accessory to the story or just an extra just carrying a tray. You
never see her with Valeria Golino, who plays the mother. Sophie
makes no appearance when she is in the frame, because she has
her own journey, her own goal, her own desire, and I really
wanted to show tha .”

There is an interesting contradiction, that emerges

with regard to the process of portraiture and its result.
Because Héloïse’s acceptance by her husband is
contingent on the acceptance of the portrait,
portraiture serves a strictly economic function; its

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mimetic aim is not free to pursue beauty or the

essence of a person but to e ectuate the transfer of a
sale. Portraiture must con ne itself to the ready-made
forms that would most please a man, in possession of
a good fortune, in want of a wife. The politics of
representation and the power of the gaze are constant
themes of the lm but they’re always wrapped into the
love story rather than a lecture. The aural cues too are
notable—the sound of brushstrokes, the rustle of
Héloïse’s dress, and their shared, tense silence of rapt
concentration. The craft of portraiture becomes the
frame through which the two women see and
sympathize with each other. Portrait poses the
aesthetic gaze as a mode of desiring that runs
counter to a distorting, appropriating male gaze; the
aesthetic gaze reciprocates, it wants to understand to
create. The possessive logic of the male gaze has
been dismantled throughout the lm. Héloïse, the
artist’s model and the object of Marianne’s attention,
at rst occupies a familiar position. Haenel, radiantly
blonde with an enigmatic, neo-Classical face, fuses
movie-star charisma with aristocratic poise. But
Héloïse, when she nally submits to Marianne’s
painterly scrutiny, hardly surrenders her powers of
observation. She is looking too, and the power of their
mutual attraction refracts like light passing through a
prism.

There is a striking dialogue in the movie where

Marianne says: “we were not given access to male
nudes…. They wanted to prevent us from creating
great art.” Women were long barred from a complete
artistic education. e Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Paris only
accepted female students in 1897. Con ned in
smaller schools for women, they were not even given
access to female nudes, who posed draped in a
cloth. “Yet the nude was the last stage of the artistic
curriculum… Preventing young women from following
this training amounted to con ning most of them in
genres considered then as secondary: portraits,

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landscapes, still life.” So if, as Virginia Woolf wrote,

there was no female Shakespeare, there was no
Leonarda either – because men gave themselves the
privilege to write about women and paint them, but
would be terrorized if the same was applied to them.
But, upon reading a book by a ctional “Mary
Carmichael”, Woolf chances upon a sentence that “lit
a torch in that chamber where nobody has yet been:
Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory.” When
women seized the pen, the brush, the chisel, it was
rst to represent themselves “when [they] are alone,
unlit by the capricious and colored light of the other
sex.” Whenever Sciamma applies artistic practice as
metaphors for the phases of Marianne and Héloïse’s
romance and intimacy — the placing of hands when
posing, the idea of painting life from the eye vs.
painting from memory — the movie feels excitingly
sensitive and formally daring. Marianne rst attempts
the painting without Héloïse’s full awareness. “Is it
feasible?” she wonders. Sciamma depicts the time
the women share as romantic suspense.

Painting isn’t the only art form Sciamma mines for

ideas and analogies. There is literature and also music
— not an added score, but a few moments of
listening. They resonate through this smart and
sensuous lm in complicated ways. Readings from
Ovid’s tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, arguing about
why he forfeits the chance to bring his wife back from
the dead; does he choose her memory over her
future, “not the lover’s choice but the poet’s”? Or is it
she who tells him to let her go? Besides that, sound
plays a crucial role in the lm, with just two di erent
musical pieces showing up strategically to intensify a
soundscape that consists otherwise entirely of natural
noise, silence, and the sighs of lovers. One is an a
cappella round sung by the women, almost atonal at
rst but then resolving into a scorchingly intense
chorale work (composed for the lm by Jean-Baptiste
de Laubier and Arthur Simonini). The lm’s most

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indelible scene takes place on the beach, as the three

protagonists stand around a bon re with other local
women. An uncanny, thrumming sound starts up, one
that seems to come from below the world itself and
resonates within our bodies. It is like something from
Lucile Hadžihalilovic or Gaspar Noé. Gradually it resolves
into the sound of these women singing: “Fugere non-
possum” – we cannot escape. There is a paradoxical
beauty here. Expressing both fatalism and faith, none
of these women can ee their fate, but here, in their
connection to one another, there is consolation – and
something like freedom. These undeniable moments
in the lm, are meant to be interpreted in various
ways. You could say Héloïse and Marianne can’t
escape from their feelings for each other or their
socially dictated roles, yet at the same time, it’s
impossible to see them as anything other than free,
just like the short time these women have together,
the freedom is minimal but ideal, as without an image,
glance, word, or brushstroke to spare.

“I don’t care about being a pioneer. People act like it would be

cool to be a pioneer. I’m okay to be looked at as tha , but it’s just
that we don’t get transmitted our cultural heri age as women
artists. When I worked documenting the body of work of all
these painters from the 18th century, I can tell you there was
de nitely some female gaze going on. ey had di erent styles,
di erent inpu , showing women with books rather than with
owers, and doing self-portraits where they looked relaxed or
where you can see their teeth when they were smiling. In the
same way, women built cinema as much as they could.”

Throughout, Marianne is haunted by a vision of

Héloïse in a wedding dress, and “haunted” is the right
word: All decked out in owing white, this Héloïse
might as well be a ghost, appearing at the end of
darkened corridors, ashing into sight and then
suddenly vanishing. The horror of looming domesticity
is interwoven with something more immediate: the
beauty of a life together, however eeting it may be.

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The two women’s furtive glances at one another soon

turn into desperate touches, but intimacy and passion
don’t always result in understanding or clarity; often,
they deepen the beloved’s mystery. As such, the tone
is sober, delicate, and deliberate. The lm builds and
builds and builds, as we keep waiting for an
explosion, a big emotional climax. And, not unlike
another great recent import, Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and
Glory, it arrives with the very last shot. One evening,
Sophie, Marianne, and Héloïse gather around the
dimly lit kitchen table for a communal reading on the
myth of Eurydice and Orpheus, legendary Greek
lovers who perish while escaping the underworld after
Orpheus de es Hade’s order and looks back at his
lover. The reading sparks a lively debate about the
responsibilities of romantic love. There is at rst broad
consensus against the indefensibility of Orpheus’s
actions – who would so foolishly implode such a
relationship? Then someone interjects with an
alternative idea. Perhaps Orpheus was practicing the
romance of a poet rather than that of a lover; one that
preferred to preserve the incorruptibility of a beautiful
thing by locking it in time. It is an unsubtle but forceful
articulation of Sciamma’s mediation on poetic love. So
when Marianne looks at Héloïse, she does not only
survey her appearance but also creates her myths
about who she is and who they are, trying to etch into
her memory the image of her lover as she is at that
moment. Ingeniously, the very romance of memory
and the beautiful melancholy of love and separation is
built into the fabric of the lm, through Marianne’s
distinctive interpretation of the myth.

The lm is as spare and elegant and symbolic as a

fairy tale, but with some of those stories’ thorny
strangeness, too, like the Italian countess who asks
Marianne to paint her “ugly” friend or a psychedelic
poultice, shared by Marianne and Heloise, that is
ingested via armpit. Sciamma plays with the
conventions of gothic horror, lming Marianne

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wandering the strangely empty house with a candle

and asking Sophie, the sole servant, the genre’s
signature question: “Can I be curious? Sciamma’s
approach to this characteristic queerness, is often
regarded as a subtle subplot narrative, yet this
understanding is harshly criticized by the National
Review for embarrassing the talent of her expression of
the profound emotional complexity: 

“ is self-conscious approach to “queerness” embarrasses

Sciamma’s alent for expressing emotional complexity, as her
mentor André Téchiné did in the superb Being 17. Portrait of a
Lady on Fire — a bold title fusing Henry James’s psychological
acuity to Alicia Keys’s pop audacity — should have been as
sensually powerful as Tru aut’s Brontë-esque lms e Story of
Adèle H. and Two English Girls, while cinematographer Claire
Mathon also evokes the neoclassical palette of Rohmer’s e
Marquise of O. Instead, it’s as sentimen al and predic able as
Carol.”

The midwife scene is Sciamma’s coup de grâce: The

maid undergoes life termination while holding the hand
of the midwife’s cooing infant. Marianne turns away
from the unsavory ritual until Héloïse shouts
“Regardez!” — insisting that she bear witness. In Film,
the loosening of conventions that makes space for a
same-sex relationship also allows the women to
create a narrative painting of an abortion, recording a
female experience that is rarely represented, even
today. The very nature of women’s art and the
marginalization of women in the art world are built into
the movie via this subplot, unwanted pregnancy, and
abortion, in a way that echoes unmistakably with the
present day. Marianne laments the exclusion of
women artists from “great subjects,” by saying women
are banned from studying male models and Héloïse is
inspired to suggest abortion as a subject of art—and,
by implication, a subject no less crucial to history and
experience, and no less intrinsically political, than the
martial pomp that was typical of o cial art. The movie

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dramatizes the constraints of the era, the imposition of

a narrow and religion-based morality, the stern
discipline that’s internalized as a result, the elision of
women and their world from public life, and the rm
expectations of family and society that Héloïse will
endure in her unwanted marriage. Yet it does more
than merely depict them—it embodies them, in the
characters’ poised stillness, which makes the airy
surroundings feel as rigid as stone. There is no way of
knowing how men and women from the eighteenth
century carried themselves, but Sciamma’s work with
the actors here re ects an inspired e ort—going far
beyond costume and décor—to evoke the inner life of
the historical period. There are two young women
faced with the task of persisting, even if external
circumstance spells the grimness of their future. The
connection to our contemporary moment feels clear.

The object that brings the two women together is also

the one that will ultimately draw them apart, and there
is nothing short of extraordinary in the way Marianne
and Héloïse wake up to the realization, in a game of
glances and gestures which, away from Héloïse’s
mother’s stare, shift from furtive to wanting, as the
young women’s relationship veers—and ultimately
gives into—a tale of sel ess love. Each glance or
pause that lingers a second too long communicates
not just erotic longing but cerebral enmeshment. “Do
all lovers feel they’re inventing something?” Héloïse
asks Marianne, shortly before they fall into bed.
Languid and sex-drunk the morning after, they’re
eager to start reinventing.

With the portrait’s completion comes an inevitable

end, cruelly punctuated in a scene in which we see in
close-up a courier, come to take the portrait,
hammering nails into the wooden box enclosing the
portrait, as if it were a co n. As Marianne says earlier
in the lm, in painting the portrait she gives Héloïse to
another—or, literally translated from the French, to

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another. The notion that their relationship can live on, if

not in reality, but their shared imagination, feels like the
most insigni cant of consolations. But a scene directly
prior to their separation structures how Portrait
ultimately understands the relationship between desire
and loss. In one scene, Héloïse and Marianne lie on
the bed facing each other, naked, a mirror strategically
placed in front of Héloïse’s inner thighs, while
Marianne sketches into the blank space of a book a
hybrid portrait of her face on Héloïse’s body. If only
their bodies could merge; as if what they desire, over
marriage and children, is the realization of a single
image, sketched in the blank space between the lines
of a story already written, of a single, shared body,
signifying total union. It is not enough to say that
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is about queer desire, but
rather about the queerness inherent in desire. The lm
returns again and again to this notion—to the
heartbreaking but sublimely felt experience of desire
as that which is suspended, but immortalized in
possibility. The National Review perceives this scene
as a amateur propaganda and accusing Sciamma as
“not trusting the expressiveness of her medium”:

“Ye , Sciamma doesn’t trust the expressiveness of her medium;

despite de technique, she s ages obvious agitprop, such as the
postcoi al modeling scene featuring a coyly placed hand mirror
that re ects the liberated painter forging her new identity.”

The full signi cance of the myth — an archetypal tale

of devotion and loss — becomes clear later on. It’s
the story of an artist, and also about the dangerous,
irresistible power of looking. And while Marianne and
Héloïse have much to say to each other, always using
the formal French mode of address, Sciamma is
equally attentive to the complex and shifting dynamics
of the beholder and beheld. There is a precision about
who is regarding whom and what it means that is
worthy of Claude Chabrol or Alfred Hitchcock. The fate of
Orpheus and Eurydice implores Marianne to turn

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around and yet she does, but then shadows fall over
Héloïse—the door shutting and cutting o the light like
a candle extinguished. That their rst physical
encounter triggers these pre-hauntings suggests that
love conjures the fear of losing before the process of
uncoupling (whether in life or death) has begun. Or, as
contemporary bard Joanna Newsom has put it: “Love is
not a symptom of time. Time is a symptom of love.”

The coda to the lm, with its neatly constructed

postscripts lled with echoes and coincidences, is
emotionally plangent but feels over-determined, and
relies on the anachronistic fantasy that women in the
late 18th century could attend the theater
unchaperoned, it is the famous opera-house nale,
featuring a distanced reunion, portrays a woman’s
sexual awakening and regret as a mawkish tragedy
greater than any other life event. Héloïse has heard
Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons through the imperfect
medium of a harpsichord that Marianne plunked on
through gauze; misremembering the composition, her
lover made it more perfect and more singular. In her
memories as she is telling through the lm, Marianne
reveals she last saw Héloïse at a concert of Vivaldi,
where her gaze was not returned. Marianne is
returned to the voyeur, the outsider, and we are left
with a tableau vivant, a moving portrait, of Héloïse’s
heartbreaking reaction to the music, lusher now but
also more meager because it’s without company.
Speaking with Amy Taubin, Céline Sciamma said that,
for this scene, she gave Haenel a list of emotions to
pass through, but trusted her to determine their
lengths and intricacies. So Sciamma, the painter,
creates beautifully because she trusts beautifully. And
Haenel does something interesting here amid her
tears. Brief as a candle, she smiles—a sticky,
incredulous, beati c movement. She shows that she
has been limned but not pinned down—a woman
alive, still capable of scintillating surprise. So Nina

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Simone sang in her rueful rendition of “Black Is the Color

of My True Love’s Hair”:

“Her picture is painted in my memory without a color of

despair, and no matter where I go, she is always there.”

Marianne watches her former lover closely as the

orchestra opens with the ‘Summer’ concerto of
Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (1716–17) – the
same section that Marianne played on the piano for
Héloïse many years before. It’s a rare musical moment
in a sonically restrained lm; the camera and Marianne
x un inchingly on Héloïse as she listens raptly, a
wrenching sequence of expressions registering on her
face. Contrary to the privileged and possessive logic
of the male gaze, Portrait of a Lady on Fire presents a
queer love story in which looking can be intensely
painful for the beholder. As the camera closes in on
Héloïse, we can almost hear her saying once more:
‘Look.’

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CONCLUSION

Not a moment in Portrait of a Lady on Fire is wasted,

which suits a story about lovers without a moment to
lose. “Do all lovers feel as though they’re inventing
something?” Héloïse asks Marianne—the rst lover
she’s ever had. Gorgeously shot by Claire Mathon,
alternating glacial daytime hues with a candlelit palette
that don faces the sensual beauty of some Carava io
paintings, and enriched by Dorothée Guiraud’s
costumes, Portrait is a joy for the eyes. It is a lm of
quiet pleasures that percolates with the sadness of an
inevitable goodbye—telegraphed from the opening
shot, and still devastatingly powerful when it is nally
conjured up. The Film does not squander its screen
time with palaver about men, shame, the ethics of
abortion, or the wrongness of love between women. It
does not even consider the potential of escape,
because to do so would be to open the door a sliver
and admit a whole host of strident speechifying on the
limiting roles to which women were then consigned,
and still are. Sciamma instead luxuriates in the easy,
ecstatic intimacy between Marianne, Héloïse, and
Sophie, as it unfurls when the tangle of expectations
and presumptions and familial ownership fall away like
the shorn threads of the Gordian knot. The subtle
charms of Céline Sciamma’s picture-perfect latest
feature lm make themselves known slowly and
surprisingly, like the nest kind of cinematic romance.
But it is the lm’s culmination that elevates this story of
love, art, and identity forged on the fringes of history
into instant classic territory, with one of the most
cathartic, heartbreaking instances of “what if…?” ever
committed to celluloid. Much like an artist’s urge to
create, desire becomes a divine calling for painter
Marianne and her unwitting subject, Heloise, women

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whose erce intellect and a strong sense of self are

su ocated by 18th-century conventions, and for
whom liberation through sexual desire is a forbidden
luxury. Sciamma could have easily been tempted by a
brief Encounter-esque epilogue and denied her
characters a ful lling closure. Instead, she sculpts an
exceptional movie moment: as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons
plays like a gospel of memory, the camera follows a
lover’s gaze and rests on Haenel being engulfed by
emotion—it suddenly possesses her like a phantom
limb of another life, not lived. In an uninterrupted take,
the actress’s face becomes the canvas for a lifetime
of sadness, regret, and acceptance, as the
inevitability of all these feelings washes over her. All
praise for the lm (which won the Queer Palm and
Best Screenplay awards in Cannes) is well-deserved,
but it is this single parting shot that will haunt the
hearts and minds of viewers long after lm festivals,
awards season, and this century are over. Portrait is
interested in eros in its less obvious forms – the way it
emerges in the most seemingly mundane of
encounters, or how obsessive love can be sparked
by the way someone curls their mouth. Portrait is a
study of two women pursuing lives larger than the
ones they’ve been given. It chooses the spirit over
formalism; poetry over realism; myth over history. At
the heart of Sciamma’s shattering love story is the
myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and in a pivotal
juncture, the girls sit by the replace to discuss the
reasons that brought the Greek god to turn back to
his beloved as she reemerged from Hades, knowing
all too well that doing so would make her vanish
forever. Watching Haenel turn her face toward the
camera after a frantic run to the cli s, the rst time her
luminous face graces the screen in a fourth-wall
rupture of enthralling magic, the myth rang achingly
close to Sciamma’s tale. Emerging from Sciamma’s
painterly compositions, framed by her DP Claire
Mathon (another female gaze), with its vibrating
transitions between the obscure and the limpid

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(echoed in the tension between brown and blue

eyes), the overwhelming discovery of sameness and
otherness in the body facing yours, the chiaroscuro of
the kitchen with the maid, “those unrecorded
gestures, those unsaid or half-said words”, the dark,
powerful shapes of the peasant women involved in an
archaic dance at dusk, when, suddenly, the hem of
Héloïse’s dress is set on re. Sapphically swoony but
occasionally didactic, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a
Lady on Fire weighs down its love story with Linda
Nochlin–esque digressions. Although set in 1770, this
same-sex romance is deeply informed by the art-
herstorical spirit of the 1970s, earnestly recalling
Nochlin’s famous query: Why have there been no great
women artists? Spontaneous combustion, dark
ancestral magic, a metaphor for a doomed passion?
Behind the veil of a doomed queer love story,
Sciamma adds a masterstroke to the rewriting of art
history. Where would a light not ignited by the re, the
anger, or the impatience of sexual di erence come
from? And more importantly, if we followed its trail,
where would it lead us?

A L K I M E R K A N TA N R I G Ü N V E R D İ

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