The romance of the century.
(spoilers for portrait of a lady on fire from "gaze" onwards)
For me, the mark of a great work of art is when it forces you to think. Really think. Not just think as you're viewing it, or just after you've stopped, but think and pose questions and incite interpretations and responses long after, in this case, the credits have rolled.
Céline Sciamma manages just that with Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It's sensual, provocative and quietly genius; hypnotic, mesmerising and brutally heart-aching. Every single shot (masterfully crafted by cinematographer Claire Mathon) is framed as if it were a painting, a portrait within itself as the title suggests. Capturing memories of this seemingly insignificant yet world-altering romance as if they flowed from strokes on a paintbrush rather than reality; capturing every single emotion oozing from lead actresses Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel, from intrigue to lust to melancholy devastation. Set to the backdrop of an isolated island in Brittany, it is Sciamma's unusual (for the genre) use of silence that tells the narrative, passion and intensity portrayed simply through fleeting gazes, lingering gentle brushes of fingertips, forbidden kisses. The only fault I can find is that France didn't send this film to the Oscars (a true crime as I'm sure anyone would attest to).
Portrait of a Lady on Fire follows French painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant) at the end of the eighteenth century as she is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) against her wishes: she does not wish to be married to a Milanese gentleman (who's betrothal to Héloïse has only been insinuated in the aftermath of her sister's untimely suicide). Marianne subsequently acts as Héloïse's hired companion to be able to paint her in secret, and accompanies her on daily walks along the rugged coastline to memorise Héloïse's features, eventually budding a romance of elegance yet intense passion between the pair. Through this romance, Sciamma provides a deeply thought provoking meditation on not only love, but gaze, memory, and the female experience.
Gaze
"Do all lovers feel they're inventing something?"
Above anything else, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is about the art of a gaze. The female gaze, an LGBTQIA+ gaze, a forbidden gaze.
Right from the birth of the auteur around the time of Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, the concept of a gaze in cinema has been paramount to establishing the characterisation, tone and narrative of a movie. Made to represent the viewpoint of a character in order to immerse an audience member into the plot, this (somewhat often omniscient) gaze is often male, often heterosexual, and often serves to hyper-sexualise women in unnecessary ways to appeal to the often male, often heterosexual audience. Taking Vertigo for an example, Hitchcock utilises a plethora of "in profile" shots of our femme fatale Madeline (Kim Novak) in order to portray her as a pillar of Western beauty; statuesque, submissive and the epitome of grace.
Scottie's (James Stewart's) voyeurism in obsessing over this superficial allure to the point of breakdown is on one note, a clear representation of the male gaze, and in reality, downright creepy.
All of this links back to Laura Mulvey's famous male gaze ideology: "is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: (i) that of the man behind the camera, (ii) that of the male characters within the film's cinematic representations; and (iii) that of the spectator gazing at the image."
However, as the 21st century progresses, a new ideology has emerged in response to Mulvey's male gaze theory: the female gaze ("a feminist film theoretical term representing the gaze of the female viewer"). Wikipedia states that "In contemporary usage, the female gaze has been used to refer to the perspective a female filmmaker (screenwriter/director/producer) brings to a film that would be different from a male view of the subject." Sciamma's work in Portrait of a Lady on Fire seems to almost be a manifesto in this female gaze, removing stereotypical sexualisation of female characters and instead replacing it with a softness of touch through the gaze of the camera, subconsciously achieved through the presence of women across many senior positions in the crew (director, producer, writer and cinematographer to name a few). Stereotypical Hollywood hyper-sexualised and objectifying close ups that dehumanise and diminish female characters to nothing more than items to be stared at are replaced by long, tender shots of fleeting gazes; stolen and forbidden glances; silences that say a thousand words. Through these transient glimpses, Sciamma is perhaps commenting on how the female gaze is always seen as a taboo, as the male gaze & sexualisation of women has become such a norm within cinema that anything breaking these boundaries appears almost radical Within moments of intimacy, the protagonists are never once reduced to objects of pleasure for a heterosexual male audience, and instead this intimacy is solely theirs: personal and meditative. As well as this, Sciamma's repetitive use of back shots establishes a clear gaze and an element of secrecy; this gaze often is that of Marianne as she attempts to navigate blossoming feelings of romance, but occasionally seems to belong to no character present at all, suggesting another, omniscient perspective to this narrative, elevating the romance beyond simple infatuation into a realm of divinity and sanctitude.
The transcendence of this romance is illustrated through the song chanted around the fire by the local women: La Jeune Fille en Feu. "They’re saying, ‘fugere non possum,’ which means ‘they come fly,'” said Sciamma. “It’s an adaptation of a sentence by Nietzsche, who says basically, ‘The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.'” Perhaps Sciamma is trying to suggest that the more this love transcends beyond social structures and stereotypes, the more the blindness of those surrounding our protagonists to ignore it appears obvious, as the relationship appears to be rapidly transcending into ethereality while the world continues turning as normal around them; the gentle hum of the music and airy harmonies leave an audience breathless, reflecting the swift yet life altering nature of this relationship.
Memory
One thing that I didn't notice on my first watch, but was blindingly obvious this time around, was how much this film is ultimately about memory. Tying in Greek mythology of Orpheus and Eurydice, Sciamma poses a singular pivotal question to an audience that is masterfully interwoven through the entire narrative in often unexpected ways: is it better to have your lover, or just the memory of them?
There's an argument to be said for both perspectives in response to the posing of that question, yet Sciamma leaves an audience with no clear answer; Marianne and Héloïse are eventually left with only the memory of the other, but is this necessarily objectively better? Perhaps the lust kindled in an evolving courtship is so intense that it overtakes all rationality, leaving your mind occupied with a captured memory of acute passion towards a lover rather than a more holistic view of your partner or a relationship. In that sense, justification could be made towards the preservation of a memory rather than a person, as it avoids all the true hardships of peservering through a relationship, providing a snapshot of that jubilant moment of intensity that can be warped inside your own mind to be pleasurable, romanticised and treasured; stains of irritation, exasperation or apathy that may only seep through later in a romance cannot touch the fondness of this memory. Choosing memory over reality is "a poet's choice"; it is the choice that Orpheus makes so he can forever live with the recollection of Eurydice, and it is te choice made by our protagonists (however, is this really their choice in the restrictive milieu of the late 18th century?). The parallels between myth and Portrait of a Lady on Fire's narrative are obvious throughout: as the three women discuss the doomed tale earlier in the film, Héloïse notes how "perhaps she [Eurydice] was the one who said 'turn around' ", and fittingly her final words to Marianne on the stairwell are too, "turn around", which Marianne obeys. Furthermore, this links to Marianne's painting of Orpheus in the process of saying goodbye to his lover pictured at the denouement of the narrative, positioned at the moment of departure rather than after Eurydice's passing to firstly, elongate the extent of this heart-aching suffering, and secondly, to capture the pain of that moment of parting, allowing an audience to analyse their ways of attempting to soak up every last snapshot of a lover so they can be engrained into memory forever. If Héloïse and Marianne's farewell is symbolic for this myth, then the act of Marianne obeying the command to turn around to get a final glimpse of Héloïse to be committed to memory forever, ultimately, doomed (almost prophetically) the pair to be parted forever: impatience and hastiness cost them each other.
Memory and regret are two concepts that are so commonly intertwined on a deep emotional level, that often we forget how linked the two are. Nothing captures the intermingling of the two better than the final shot of this film, as Héloïse breaks down in tears to the playing of Vivaldi's violin concerto (no.2 in G minor from his "four seasons"); the same piece played rather clumsily by Marianne on a harpsichord near the exposition of the film as Héloïse voiced her longing to hear an orchestra. Perhaps the overwhelmingly visceral experience of finally achieving this longing, without the lover that indoctrinated the deep admiration for this turbulently fast paced piece within her, caused all the memories of their romance to come flooding back to Héloïse, cultivating profuse regret. This lamentation is clearly shared between both our protagonists, as Marianne's final utterance of "she didn't see me" harbours a sense of immense regret, loss and grief at the choosing of memories over the physicality of the other. However, Sciamma interweaves the comment throughout (often lost as subtleties to brewing passion) that Marianne and Héloïse in fact had no choice in the decision between fantasy and reality: in the harsh milieu of the eighteenth century, despite the transcendence of their romance, it simply would have been forbidden. Similarly to the role of fate in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, an omniscient, exterior forces with malicious ulterior motives are clearly at play here, tearing lovers from each other through a manifestation as societal structures that forbid deviance from heteronormativity, silent femininity and obedience. Alongside the emotional music (one of the few rare instances of diegetic music throughout the film), Sciamma provides a heartbreaking finish to a heart-wrenching romance.
Elements of the supernatural are also seamlessly interwoven by Sciamma in order to establish the often nebulous nature of memory. Stood by the fire as women chant and sing mesmerisingly, Héloïse appears hazy in the light of the flames, echoing the later concern voiced by Héloïse of "after a while you'll see her when you think of me" as Marianne paints her and consistently reminding an audience that this memory of summer romance, however recent it may have been for Marianne, is already beginning to fray at the edges; this poses an alternate perspective to the central question of memory, should the lovers have chosen each other over this impermanent and foggy remembrance? Twice throughout the film, Marianne appears to hallucinate and see Héloïse in a wedding gown in a dark hallway, and on first viewing it is unclear what this ghostly apparition is (is it a memory or a figment of her imagination?), but seen at the end of the film, Héloïse almost fulfils this prophetic hallucination, pictured in that very same dress purchased for her by her mother. As Marianne is looking back on the experience from the future, again this warping of time and intermingling of memories represents the blurring of the lines between truth and fiction, reality and romanticised memory; can we, as audience members, believe anything that the camera shows us through Marianne's gaze, or have moments and glances been subconsciously altered to hide pain, regret or longing? Possibly this question could be said to be answered in the final scene as Marianne sees a painting of Héloïse and her new daughter, Héloïse's fingers opening page 28 of the book in which Marianne's self portrait lies; a subtle hint that despite a new marriage and family, Héloïse's deep love and infatuation for her lover lives on.
Femininity in the 18th century
Alongside underlying comments on the unfairness of restrictive abortion laws (or societal viewpoints) and the dangerous misogyny that leads to unsafe abortion, Sciamma delicately explores through Portrait of a Lady on Fire how the concept of femininity is synonymous with secrecy. I could spent all day exploring the subtleties of Sciamma's odyssey into demonstrating the taboos of sexuality, especially outside of heteronormativity and heterosexual stereotypes, the uncomfortable nature of intimacy in the restrictive milieu of the eighteenth century (as Héloïse's mother appears uneasy in Marianne's embrace in the denouement of the film) and the role of the beach in being a location to break free from societal expectations for our protagonists to allow for freedom of lust and passion. For now, though, I will simply say this: Sciamma is a master in capturing the multifaceted nature of femininity and the female experience, a master.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is many things. Ethereal, heartbreaking, quietly thoughtful, passionate, picturesque, still, mesmerising, hypnotic, perfect. Simply one of the best films of 2019, and may I say of all time, capturing gaze, memory and femininity in a way that feels so timeless, yet modern and pressingly relevant in the same breath; it is a masterpiece in every way imaginable.
(for anyone who enjoyed Portrait of a Lady on Fire as much as I did, I recommend Call Me by Your Name (dir. Luca Guadagnino).