Portrait of a Lady on Fire: Daring to See

In Céline Sciamma’s unabashedly romantic and fiercely political film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), two women fall in love and set each other free, if for only a few glorious days or weeks. It is one of the most unforgettable depictions of love foresworn, of lesbian love, of any true love, in cinema. Around the besotted lovers, the film envisions a social contract defined by a strong sense of community among women, no matter their age or class. It takes place in the late eighteenth century, but it also speaks to our own time, as many women continue to call for intersectional solidarity in their fight for equality. It is no accident that here the engine of this revolution is art. Sciamma, who grew up outside Paris and would bike into a neighboring town to go to the movies, creates a provincial world in which art—both as a technique governed by solemn tradition and a practical tool for remaking one’s world—is a part of daily life, and in which the artist’s gaze is reciprocal, not one-sided. Similarly, the film presents the act of falling in love not through the (quintessentially male, one might say) lens of conquest and possession but through one of equality between the two lovers, creating a reality in which each can truly see the other.

The preoccupations with longing and looking—who is gazing and who is returning the gaze—are not new for Sciamma, nor is the centering of a kind of character not often seen on-screen. The director’s previous three features are poignant contemporary coming-of-age stories: In Water Lilies (2007), an adolescent girl experiences her first lesbian crush. In Tomboy (2011), a young child, Laure, tests the bounds of sexuality and gender. Girlhood (2014) is the story of a teenage French-African girl who finds a way of navigating the violence and poverty of her life by joining an all-female gang. Although Sciamma’s stories often tell of yearning—and always from a queer, female point of view—the director is far from a fatalist: in her films, love paves the way to personal growth and creates a keen sense of one’s own self-worth. Like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Water Lilies and Tomboy both revolve around intense looking. And in Tomboy, Laure’s portrait being drawn is a painful reminder of just how powerful it can be to be seen by another. Another memorable moment of recognition takes place in Girlhood, when the heroine, Marieme (Karidja Touré), watches her best friends dance to Rihanna’s “Diamonds.” Here, the young black women claim their spots as divas, agitators, rebels, rather than people shunted off—by the education system and by the men around them—into roles of caregivers or sex workers. When the reserved Marieme turns from observer to participant and joins the dance, it is a thrilling instance of feminine jouissance: sensual, luminous, radiating warmth. This vision of joyous sisterhood returns in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma’s first period film, in which she shows us that although desire leaves us vulnerable and exposed, it also defies solitude.

The film takes place on an isolated island off the northern coast of France. A young painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), has been hired, ostensibly as a walking companion for an obdurate heiress, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). Marianne’s real job, however, is to paint a bridal portrait of Héloïse without arousing the suspicion of her model, who is resisting being married off to rescue the family’s fortunes and thus refuses to pose. Héloïse has been brusquely pulled from her happy life in a Benedictine convent by her countess mother to marry a wealthy Milanese man previously engaged to her older sister, who committed suicide by jumping off a cliff. “In her last letter, she apologized,” Héloïse will say of her sister, “for leaving me her fate.” Marianne arrives on the island soaked, having dived into the water to rescue her painting supplies after the rocking boat knocked them overboard. A bit later, she sits naked by the fire at her new residence, facing her dripping canvases. In this scene, Sciamma deliciously evokes the female nude as a sexually charged subject in painting. It is intensely pleasurable to look at Marianne, but her own pleasure, in the warmth and in her tobacco, and her sense of liberty are equally striking. The moment also prefigures a metaphorical denuding. Governed by her training in portraiture, Marianne begins with rigid notions of composition, which Héloïse will come to challenge.

Sciamma and the cinematographer Claire Mathon, who also photographed Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019), convey beautifully the island’s unstable climate. The acuteness of the sunlight outdoors reminds me of the divine brightness in Paul Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon, painted in Brittany, not far from the movie’s setting. Natural light seems to permeate the film from the start, indoors as well as out. The choice to use digital cameras allowed Sciamma and Mathon to capture interior scenes in much lower light than might otherwise have been possible, contributing a great deal to the painterly quality of the images. A cool light seeps into the study where Marianne sets up her canvases when she must paint at night, from her mind’s eye, and into Marianne’s visions of Héloïse emerging from the dark in a white gown. The startling glow of that whiteness—like that of the peasants’ bonnets in Gauguin—is almost blinding. The film weaves a series of oppositional ambiences: wet and dry, fiercely lit and swathed in shadows, warm and cold. On Héloïse’s first walk with Marianne as chaperone, the dunes are buffeted by strong, dry winds. And yet the morning mist offers a welcome shelter from the glare of the sun, and creates images that echo the early one of the wet canvases. That coolness is offset by the warmth of the fireplace in the kitchen where Marianne, Héloïse, and Sophie pass much of their time in close camaraderie, playing cards, cooking together (in a subversion of the expectations of their class), and telling stories. Fire appears as domestic hearth, as premonition of passion (especially in the bonfire scene in the village), and, again, as a homely, comforting blaze, during the abortion that Marianne and Héloïse help Sophie to procure.

Sciamma imbues the abortion scene with uncanny intimacy. Sophie’s holding the tiny hand of the midwife’s baby during the procedure is one of the fiercest feminist gestures I’ve seen in film in recent years. “Look,” Héloïse commands Marianne. Back at the mansion, they pull a mattress to the floor, and by the fire’s glow, Marianne paints Sophie, still flushed from pain, with Héloïse posing as the midwife. Héloïse’s order suggests that art can be an act of solidarity—a meaningful encounter with another. But perhaps it also means that art cannot be truly great without risk, of breaking new aesthetic ground or of touching a raw nerve. Sciamma has said that a line in L’événement, a memoir by the French writer Annie Ernaux about an illegal abortion she had in 1963, was an inspiration for this scene in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. “I do not believe there exists a Workshop of the Backstreet Abortionist in any museum in the world,” Ernaux writes wistfully. Paint what we really see, Héloïse seems to be telling Marianne—a potent challenge.