"Portrait of a Lady on Fire" - NYFF Review
The painter informs her model that she knows when the model is frustrated and when she cannot think of what to say. The model wonders how the painter knows this, when the painter has only been acquainted with the model for a couple of days. The painter responds that she has been watching the model intently. The model then asks the painter to approach her, to lower her head to the model’s level. What is the difference, the model asks, between the painter’s position and the model’s position? The model is the subject of the painter’s gaze, the painter replies. No, the model insists, each is the subject of the other’s gaze. And then the model informs the painter that she in fact knows when the painter is frustrated, and when she cannot think of what to say. (It is the arch of the painter’s eyebrow, the movement of her hands.) One need not practice art in order to perceive.
So unfolds one of the many intoxicating scenes in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the French film that won Best Screenplay at Cannes and played at the New York Film Festival this past weekend. The painter concerned is Marianne (Noémie Merlant), commissioned for the wedding portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), a young woman due to wed Milanese nobility. The problem: Héloïse will not pose, so Marianne must take the guise of her walking partner, and paint from memory. The last man hired for the portrait failed, frustrated by the conditions for observance, and when Marianne arrives at Héloïse’s household, she finds his only attempt. An immaculately rendered body, with the head blotted out.
The film does not reveal Héloïse’s face until around the twenty-minute mark, and the buildup is tantalizing. Is Héloïse somehow unattractive? One tracking shot appears to depict her arrival at the house—we see the folds of the green dress that she wore for the abandoned portrait—only it is Sophie, the family servant (a wonderful Luàna Bajrami), carrying the piece in her arms. We discover early on, too, that Héloïse is returning from a convent, after the death of her sister. Might Marianne find marks of grief etched into her complexion? Sophie tells Marianne that this unnamed sister fell from the cliffs that comprise the de facto backyard of the property, which sits on an island in Brittany, and Sophie thinks it was suicide.
When Héloïse’s features finally make themselves known, it is after she runs from Marianne, through the trees that border the front door and across the fields that brush up against the cliffs. Marianne is terrified that Héloïse will jump. Héloïse stops at the edge—and her blond hair whips in the wind as she turns toward Marianne—but she admits the consideration: “I’ve wanted to do that for years.”
The film’s writer and director, Céline Sciamma, who graduated from La Fémis, seems to have taken the technical craft learned at France’s most prestigious film school and imbued it with a rarer kind of poise. The quiet of the film—found from the spaces in between Marianne and Héloïse’s conversations to the light blue of Marianne’s bedroom—indicates hesitance, but also patience.
After the screening, Sciamma explained that she wanted the film to depict the “sexiness of consent.” And maybe that’s what this patience represents: the ways in which Marianne and Héloise, who experience attraction from the moment they meet, must explore the vulnerabilities and inconsistencies of their eventual lovers’ dispositions— perhaps without realizing that they are doing so—before the anticipated consummating act transpires.
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Which takes a while. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is notable, understandably, because it was written and directed by a queer woman (it was the first such film to win the Queer Palm at Cannes). Though I am no opponent of telling stories outside of a creator’s personal circumstances, it is clear that Portrait of Lady of Fire might have been shortchanged had a heterosexual director presided over its execution. With Sciamma at the helm, however, the audience experiences the sexual energy of the film’s protagonists even—and maybe especially—when they are not in bed together. The scene described at the top of this page is so clearly underlined by desire, evident in Héloise’s blue-eyed intensity and Marianne’s matching of it, that to make the scene the precursor to sex would feel obvious.
And even better, the women’s attraction morphs, wind-tousled and transcendently, into love. Then, when Héloise and Marianne assist Sophie with her medical needs, it almost reads as motherhood. Héloise, when convinced by Marianne to sit for her portrait (to the astonishment of Héloise’s mother), cannot stop smiling. The collapse of her facial neutrality, again and again, in spite of Marianne’s admonishments, radiates across the frame.
In his scathing critique of Call Me By Your Name, D.A. Miller attacks the “mandatory aesthetic laminate,” or dependably scenic settings around which mainstream queer cinema like Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 film revolves. Miller writes that this filter is “what we are asked to look at instead,” instead of the sex that presumably occurs within Guadagnino’s Italian countryside estate, or in Sciamma’s French manor.
Miller is focusing on gay male relationships, and he is right to lament the constant denial of explicit sexual activity in queer Oscar contenders. Portrait of a Lady on Fire contains no explicit sex—it certainly evades comparisons to Blue is the Warmest Color—but the film’s light-dappled bedrooms and rocky beaches would be empty without Héloise and Marianne. These places are beautiful because of the women who occupy them. The film works, then, as a heightened visual journey, aided by exterior landscapes but driven by something else, something that moves through corridors and between minds, intelligent and uninhibited, true and burning.
Fergus Campbell is a Culture writer and sophomore in Columbia College.
