![]() We are introduced to Marianne right away, an artist teaching a painting class who notices one of her old (quite possibly secret) works ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’. Set in the 18th century, this forbidden queer period drama does a lot. It spends its time with the characters as they fall in love. Portrait is a profoundly tender story about self discovery, becoming and the anticipation of coming to terms with being noticed by someone. Céline Sciamma’s 2019 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady on Fire deals with these very concepts. Rarely, if ever, do we investigate the working and interactions of our experiences, our senses and our desires. The finger remains the same, yet it receives such varied reactions. The only relevant difference between Author A and Author P is their separate, individual reality. The only silver lining is that whichever genius decided to name this autotrophic piece of sinew ‘Lady’s finger’ has an imagination equally morbid and has learnt to hide it with subtlety. You don’t need to imagine it, you already have. Imagine having your brain sheared off, cutting your fingers off, frying them and then eating them. ![]() Yet despite repeated testaments to vendakya being the key to infinite intelligence and reassurance that ‘this is just a phase’, Author A dislikes (to say the least) this wretched organism from the depths of their existence. To some (including Author P), it is the greatest thing on earth, a true delicacy and the most OP vegetable known to humankind. Readers are encouraged to watch the movie before they proceed. It’s deeply romantic and also deeply thoughtful – an electric combination.The following article contains extensive spoilers for the film ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’. One of the many winning things about this film is that it exists in a wider world dominated by the desires and rules of men but Sciamma strips men out of the film almost entirely, apart from during its bookends. It’s also an intensely moving evocation of female love and friendship, without ever being coy or unnecessarily erotic. ‘Portrait’ might be set in the 1770s but it feels totally contemporary and relevant in its energy and in what it says about art and who’s making it, and how that affects how we view the world and each other. A bond emerges, too, with the only other person left in the house when Héloïse’s mother travels away: a servant, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), who gets help from both women when a crisis emerges in her life. Marianne does get her subject to sit for her – but what happens is far more interesting than just superficial success as a growing bond develops between them that’s reflected in the curious development of the paintings. Marianne’s challenge is to get Héloïse to sit for her during the time they live in close quarters in her family home, talking walks on the stormy beach or in the nearby dunes. We see her being rowed by a boatful of men to a remote island: she’s a professional painter for hire, and she’s arriving there to paint Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), a young woman whose mother wants a portrait of her to send to her prospective husband, an aristocrat in Milan.Īlready one painter has come and gone. It begins with Marianne (Noémie Merlant) teaching an art class that throws us into an extended flashback to a pivotal moment in her life that takes up almost the entire film. But it harbours a rising passion that’s devastating when it bursts into life. It feels stately and quiet at first, and you wonder if it might end up being too polite, too controlled. It’s Sciamma’s most cerebral and challenging work to date, and one that’s full of ideas about artists and muses, the female gaze and solidarity. Now, with ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’, she has crafted a powerfully original story of art and love, almost entirely set on a Breton island in the eighteenth century, and one that operates on the level of a painterly, radical reverie – just somewhere to the left of reality. ![]() Those earlier films were all contemporary, realist tales. Céline Sciamma is one of the most exciting young French filmmakers around: her ‘Water Lilies’, ‘Tomboy’ and ‘Girlhood’ are all intimate, intense studies of young girls or young women at points of profound change in their lives.
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