There are many moments in Portrait of a Lady on Fire where the camera simply doesn’t move. It trains itself on a character, more often than not on the statuesque and stunning Helose, and seems to absorb every bit — physicality to mental make-up — that defines her, going below the skin and travelling beyond the superficial. The 2019 French film, now streaming on MUBI, represents the female gaze. But this is not a woman looking at a man… it’s a woman looking at a woman, with director Celine Sciamma fashioning a distinctively poignant portrait of forbidden romance that employs steady glances and brief caresses to tell its tale of love and longing.
A rich period piece set towards the end of the 18th century, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is love-affirming but also talks realistically about the inevitabilities of life. A young painter named Marianne (Noemie Merlant) finds herself travelling to the isolated island of Brittany after being commissioned to paint the portrait of Helose, a woman of privilege, who is betrothed to a Milanese nobleman. The headstrong Helose (Adele Haenel) has so far refused to pose for her portrait, given that she’s against her impending marriage, and Marianne is given the unenviable task of winning over the irate Helose by pretending to be her walking companion.
But time is of the essence here, and it’s upto Marianne to surreptitiously observe Helose’s physical features by the day so that she can get down to sketching them from memory at night. The two become close, but what starts off as friendship and a certain comfort in each other’s company, gradually and seamlessly transforms into an unspoken, if doomed, romance.
Feted at the Cannes Film Festival last year, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is art in motion. Filmed with a certain stillness — the silences in this film speak more often than its words — the frames are mounted like a painting, with the central protagonists — the two women — inhabiting it to not only tell an intimate tale of love, but also a deeply empowering account of women finding a place for themselves. There’s hardly a male presence in the film, but even then the protagonists — so also the women in the audience — can’t escape the claustrophobic feeling of being shackled by patriarchy. The setting may be three centuries ago, but, as the film shows, the impediments women face are both eternal and universal.
Aided by some mesmerising cinematography by Claire Mathon — yes, this is a film by women and of women — Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a slow-burn watch. Things move leisurely through its two-hour running time, with Sciamma not really interested in arriving at a defined denouement, as she is in making the viewer travel along with the emotional troughs and crests that Marianne and Helose are destined to experience. Parts of it will definitely test your patience, but the film guarantees a rich payoff in the form of a feminist fable that’s both visually exquisite and dramatically intoxicating.
A tender exploration of self-discovery as it is of a love that knows no boundaries, Portrait of a Lady on Fire focuses succinctly on the fleeting nature of a romance that refuses to conform vis-a-vis the permanence of art. Marianne paints a portrait of Helose with both dignity and dedication, fully aware of the fact that it is her art — the portrait is, after all, for Helose’s wedding — that will take her love away from her. The lovemaking scene between the two, which follows a passionate kiss on the beach as the waves lash in the distance, is filmed tenderly and is a moving tribute to the doomed love story of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a love story that will make the viewer’s heart alternately sing in ecstasy and break with immeasurable pain. A lot of that has to do with Noemie Merlant and Adele Haenel bringing in power, pathos and profundity to their acts in much the same way as Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos did in yet another lesbian love story, the French film Blue is the Warmest Colour, a 2013 Palme d’Or winner at Cannes. The worlds of the two films may be poles apart, but in emotion and empathy, they are very much alike.
Give Portrait of a Lady on Fire a watch. That final moment of the camera (in truth, Marianne’s gaze) lingering on Helose as she dissolves in a fit of sobs, is a cinematic image guaranteed to stay on with you for a long time.