The Transcendent Power of Art in ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’
Celine Sciamma’s 2019 masterpiece of desire, forbidden love, and tragedy
Director Céline Sciamma decided upon two key omissions early in production of Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). First, that there would be few smiles from the all-female cast in what became the first 70 minutes of runtime. Second, that there would be no music, save two scenes where it crystallizes with the power and emotion of a thunderstorm. “…you will have to find the musicality of the film elsewhere,” Sciamma said in an interview with IndieWire. “In the rhythm of the scenes, in the bodies of the actors.”
The film follows Marianne, a french painter commisioned to secretly make a portrait of Héloïse, the daughter of an aristocrat who resides in a castle on the island where the film takes place. The painting must be created secretly because Héloïse refused to pose for the previous painter in protest of her upcoming arranged marriage. She is quite literally trapped, her anger an everpresent flame beneath a steely expression.
Over the course of the film, desire between Marianne and Héloïse swells like the tumultuous ocean which they gaze upon while stealing longing glances at each other, until the swells coalesce into a grand wave of passionate hunger, a necessity for each other’s touch. Portrait portrays the yearning and desperate lust of an early relationship better than any film I’ve seen, all upon the tragic backdrop of the lovers’ knowledge that what they’ve captured cannot last. For Héloïse is betrothed to another, a Milanese aristocrat who she barely knows.
The lack of music in most of Portrait is jarring, and requires magnificent performances from the actors who play Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) and Marianne (Noémie Merlant) to provide rhythm to the love that we experience through them. Sciamma pulls off her unconventional approach, which she describes as purposeful, “to put the viewer in the same physical condition and frustration” as the forbidden lovers.
Sciamma meticulously establishes the two characters, draws out their building desire through furtive glances and suppressed smiles. Indeed, we don’t see them kiss until nearly 80 minutes into the film. That’s not to say there is no intimacy, but rather points to the mastery of the craft that Sciamma exhibits in showing such intimacy outside of traditional means. The tender framing, the lush sound design, the warm cinematography, the careful dialogue. All of it adds to a tension which grows so tight that by the time they finally embrace and commit to their love, emotion pours out like a gushing river in which the viewer cannot help but be swept away.
“Not everything is fleeting. Some feelings are deep”
One night, Héloïse reads to Marianne and a servant girl named Sophie, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. She tells the greek myth in which, following Eurydice’s death, Orpheus makes a deal with Hades, god of the underworld, to rescue his beloved from the clutches of death. The only catch is that Orpheus must not look back as Eurydice follows him back to life. He breaks this promise when he doesn’t hear Eurydice’s footsteps, and turns around in fear, breaking the spell and sentencing his wife to a second death.
The iconic myth exhibits undeniable parallels to Héloïse and Marianne’s doomed love. Marianne, recognizing this, offers a unique perspective. “Perhaps he makes a choice. He chooses the memory of her, that’s why he turns. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s.” She says this while staring directly at Héloïse, representing the eventual tragedy of her choice to let go of their love and hold on to the memory. Héloïse meets her gaze and replies, “perhaps she [Eurydice] was the one that replied, ‘turn around.’”
Thus, the two women agree—before we even see the incredible bonfire scene that signifies their leap of faith into each other’s love—that they will both make the poet’s choice. They will part, Héloïse will marry, and all that will remain of their love is its memory.
It’s a tragic end to their love story, one certainly all too common in the time when a love between women was scandalous, and a woman’s duty was to marry whichever man her family chose for her. While the tragedy of the lovers never seeing one another is felt in the epilogue, the film doesn’t dwell on it. Rather, it focuses on art as an act of preservation.
Marianne’s painting of Héloïse will hang in her home for as long as she lives, they each will treasure the sketches of each other that Marianne made, and Marianne’s later works of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (painting) will outlive their lives and their love. Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” will outlive us all. And Portrait of a Lady on Fire (the film) will continue to inspire filmmakers, writers, lovers, and those who’ve experienced heartbreak.
Marianne in front of her depiction of Orpheus and Eurycide
At the end of the film, we see Marianne exhibiting her painting of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, of which a passing man (after assuming the painting was her father’s) is struck by the moment she chose to show. Rather than showing Orpheus before he turns, or after, as Euricyde dies, Marianne painted the moment in between, where they are saying goodbye.
Director Céline Sciamma researched for the film a history of woman painters being systematically erased, all the way back to cave paintings, and especially around the time of the French Revolution. She grew melancholic reflecting on this injustice, saying, “art is about the transmission of our intimacies, and as women, we haven’t been transmitted that at all.”
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is Sciamma’s reclamation of these erased women. It is Sciamma’s statement that art has the power to transcend boundaries of social conventions, or familial duties, or any other reason for the loss of love. It is a masterful modern retelling of a classic tragedy, which expertly plays with the power of film to draw the viewer into a love story that feels so visceral, so heartbreaking, and so unjust, that one cannot help but turn off the TV with a profoundly changed perspective of love itself.
