Portrait of a Lady on Fire took the costume period piece and romance drama, breathed life into it then transcended genre to make an arresting drama about women in eighteenth century France. The protagonist is a painter, but as she gets acclimated to her surroundings, other women gradually begin to take form as we immerse ourselves into their time on the island and gradually begin to dread the inevitability of leaving it.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire made a lot of top ten lists. I initially dismissed the hype because I am not into romance dramas regardless of the central couple’s gender, but then I saw the preview, realized it was too reductive to call it a romance drama and only decided to see it during its second week because I knew that it was coming to my favorite theater on a bigger screen, and I could eat real butter popcorn while watching it. Words cannot convey what Celine Sciamma, the writer and director, has accomplished with this movie. It is such a confident, focused, steady yet emotionally resonant film.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire transformed the organic, quotidian details of life into a rich story in the way that people become greater than oneself when even briefly they become part of a community and discover love. The story is simple and beautiful. In the wrong hands, it would be overwrought and melodramatic. Romantic dramas usually get the details of daily life wrong, but this film is rich with the practical logistics of daily life. The film makes us think of the aspects of life that most movies skip over in a misguided rush to get to the meat of the story whereas Sciamma seems to get that in order for us to believe that love can suddenly sweep away and transform a character, we have to first know that character.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire builds suspense into every aspect of the story by taking the time to depict every moment and through framing. How do you get places? If you are a painter, how do you work and what do you need? If you are a human being, how do you get used to a new environment? How do you get to know people? How does the experience change you? How does it change them? What effect does the different combinations of groups have on the overall dynamic of the household? The love is credible because it is rooted in life. It evokes hunger, discomfort, feeling cold or warm. Human beings are bodies.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire effectively builds suspense. The titular character appears in the distance in a painting, then in fragments and then in person as the painter begins to study parts of her until she becomes a whole person, and in turn, inwardly, the painter becomes fuller as well. Every actor in this film is amazing, but Adele Haenel has such a fierce, stern and riveting visage that when she finally makes her appearance, we understand why the painter is stunned. I loved the idea that the worldly woman of experience can still be mentally shocked and has to be roused from her complacency with life, and the other character who, based on her experience, should be this naïve, halting woman is actually this bracing, lively and bold presence. They are both women who are comfortable in their skin and know who they are, but until Haenel’s character, Heloise, appears, we do not realize that the painter still has a lot of room to grow as a person and a professional. Haenel’s scrutiny is so piercing that the painter almost entirely loses her earlier confidence. She becomes a painter who cannot look. Each has something that makes the other live fuller lives. Side note: Haenel is Sciamma’s ex, which I did not discover until after I watched the movie, but it makes sense. The painter is visually equated with the director in many ways. In the beginning of the film, the screen is really a large piece of paper to draw on. Both structure the story by instructing the students and telling a story about their past.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s use of music is judicious and explosive. There is no soundtrack per se. There is little music featured in the film, which helps us relate to the characters on a sensory level. The music is diegetic, heard by the characters, and it bleeds from one scene into the other. It is a reflection of the internal, spiritual state of the two women as they finally fall in love with each other. Heloise’s love of music and reading is not just a theoretical hunger because once we hear music, we realize how starved we were for it before, we just were numb to it.
I am doing my best not to give away too many details from Portrait of a Lady on Fire so you can experience it yourself, but the double identity of this location as a prison and sanctuary from the outside world is an arresting one. Why can’t we sustain happiness? Sure this film is set in the past, but how different is life now? There are no villains in the film, but there is also no sustained, external resistance against societal expectations. While I love the image and the feelings evoked by this depiction of an internal democracy, a ruthless solidity to one’s inner self, why is it so hard to resist the slow suffocation of that self over the course of a life? Shout out to the people who can think and live like pioneers by embracing happiness and sustaining it in spite of the storm of shoulds.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is like a laid back spy thriller because the painter has to hide her true profession, and somehow still uncover secrets to accomplish her job. There is also a constant whiff of mortality and fragility as if death or the slightest change could destroy anything and anyone. It often feels like a ghost story, but the only explicit supernatural aspect in this film is a vision of the future. Still it feels as if Sciamma and Ari Aster are cinematic siblings who know that civilization hides something underneath the surface of nature and civilization.
Even though they are utterly different films, I felt that all of the (undeserved) compliments bestowed upon The Witch deserved to be awarded to this film. I loved Little Women, but what Greta Gerwig did with Amy’s speech, this movie did seamlessly and almost wordlessly throughout. Paradise Hills, a little known sci fi film, feels as if it drank from the same stream as Ciamma, but could not quite conjure the vision that she witnessed. Before Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I heard about Ciamma when I heard positive reviews about her previous film, Girlhood, which had a black woman protagonist, but after seeing a few films with white woman directors and writers with black protagonists and being sorely disappointed (The Fits-uneven, Kings—the worst film of 2018), I ran screaming the other way. This movie was so perfect that I tentatively added Girlhood to the bottom of my queue. She managed to get me invested and feel the characters’ attraction, invoke solidarity across class lines without making me roll my eyes and convey the mutability of women’s positions without telling, but showing. She is a director that makes you feel and does not lecture. A strong contender for one of the best movies of the year!