Céline Sciamma has become a filmmaker notorious for crafting films of real intimacy and beauty. Her latest, the much-lauded Cannes darling Portrait of a Lady on Fire, continues her hot streak – an elegiac, poetic piece of work that will, if you excuse the pun, set your heart ablaze.
Image provided by LFF
Taking us back to 18th Century Brittany, we open to Marianna (Noémie Merlant) as the subject of an art class – fine strokes on easels delicately try to capture the woman in blue. When one of the students enquires into one of her paintings – the titular lady on fire portrait – Marianna recounts how she came to creating the piece, detailing her relationship with its subject: Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), the beautiful daughter of a Countess (Valeria Golino). Wanting a portrait of her daughter to send to her suitor, the Countess hires Marianne to paint her. Héloïse, however, is unaware she’s being painted – dismissing her marriage and refusing to sit for any artist – so believes the new girl on the island to be a companion, to accompany her on walks and the like – Marianne using this time to study her subject to paint her in secret.
Unlike most love stories, Portrait of a Lady on Fire really takes its time to build its relationship. It’s slow and sumptuous, really letting the script breathe and the characters grow. So much time is spent on just getting to know Héloïse and Marianne; many scenes just involve the girls conversing as they first become friends then lovers. But it’s all so authentically written that we’re immediately invested. We get to know these characters as they do one another. We fall for their relationship as they fall in love. Sciamma so meticulously builds on the little details to create a narrative that is wholly entrancing because of all its subtleties and nuances; piling it all up until the film just becomes a sledgehammer of emotion. The fact that their time is limited together, with Héloïse soon to be married off, adds a whole time-bomb element to the proceedings – Sciamma utilising this underlying tension to really add salt in the wound and make their relationship all the more heartbreaking and thrilling to watch unfold.
Of course, a large reason the film works so masterfully is the performances Merlant and Haenel bring to the table; they have such veritable chemistry together, telling so much through minimal dialogue and just simple gazes. It’s layered acting, not marred by woeful scriptwriting or overcooked dialogue, where the leads just share a setting together and let their presence convey their intimacy and do all the storytelling. Even such a simple thing as Marianne’s piercing, artistic stare contrasting with Héloïse’s more delicate gaze and how these looks come to meaning so much can go a long way in bringing the conviction. What Sciamma gets from her leads are two of the year’s best performances – work that is more physical than talkative but acting that goes a long way in making the audience care for these women.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is that rare piece of work that only comes along on occasion: it’s a masterful study of love and character; gorgeously lensed; subliminally acted and perfectly crafted; taking audiences on a journey through the relationship of these two women. Like their romance, confined on the island – unpopulated and devoid of political semantics and the tarnish of man – the film exists separate from everything else in the world. It’s in its own bubble. A bubble that is intimate, soaring and an escape from all the destruction we’re so accustomed to in today’s society – a bubble in which love is all-consuming. This is the kind of film that just makes your heart soar whilst simultaneously shattering it into tiny pieces, making you long for a love like the one we see on-screen but reminding us such pure, unfiltered love is a rarity. In simple words: Portrait of a Lady on Fire is cinema as undiluted escapism – elegiac, monolithic and beautifully intimate.
Portrait Of A Lady On Fire will be released on 28th February 2020.
