Portrait of a Lady on Fire

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE   ***1/2

Céline Sciamma

2019

IDEA:  On a remote part of Brittany in the 18th century, an artist and the woman whose marriage portrait she's hired to paint find themselves falling in love.

BLURB:  The portrait around which Portrait of a Lady on Fire revolves is the product and locus of reciprocating female gazes, a representation of a history of women’s voices and labor hidden and subsumed under patriarchal culture. It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a mise-en-abyme of Céline Sciamma’s film itself. Like the painting, which is forged from the intimate and egalitarian meeting of female subjects, Portrait of a Lady on Fire fashions itself as a distaff oasis, restoring to the canons of both painting and cinema the agency of women. It is in this uncovered milieu that Marianne and Héloïse are free to entwine their gazes and their bodies, as well as to explore roles of subjectivity and representation that find their conduits in the visual arts. Sciamma’s frames, alternately awash in limpid pastels and lit in golden Vermeer light, effectively turn the medium of film into an extension of painting, taking portraits of the central women in lingering two-shots that allow every minute gesture to seem infinitely present, impressing themselves upon our memories. But Portrait of a Lady on Fire is as much about the power of the gaze to hold and retain as it is about its transience, its inability to fully materially grasp an object, no matter how intently ones stares. It’s in this way that Sciamma’s film charts a fairly familiar trajectory of forbidden love made briefly, hotly present. But by situating this narrative within this idiom, and by interrogating the politics of its aesthetics, she is able to make it into something that defies the fate of its romance: a portrait that indexes a whole other world of feeling and desire that no mimetic image can contain.