'Portrait of a Lady On Fire' Review
BY CHARLIE HOBBS
“When do we know it’s finished?”
“At some point, we stop.”
Early in the final act of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) places the finishing touches on a portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). The painter’s brush moves to the collarbone on the canvas, which she dabs with gentle certainty. In the audience, my own shoulders shot to my ears. I was sure, for a moment, that I had felt those bristles on my own neck. Such is the nature of this film director-screenwriter Celine Sciamma has crafted: a runtime of moments so unexpectedly intimate that one could (as I did) weep upon the rolling of the credits out of a personal sense of loss.
Several weeks prior, Marianne arrives on the remote island where Héloïse resides. Héloïse’s mother, a French Countess (Valeria Golino), has commissioned Marianne to paint a wedding portrait of her daughter. The husband-to-be, an Italian nobleman, was originally engaged to Héloïse’s sister; she commited suicide, flinging herself from the jagged cliffs at the island’s edge, to avoid the marriage. Héloïse’s refusal to sit requires Marianne to pose as a companion for walks, painting her only from memory and in secret.
And memorize Héloïse Marianne certainly does. Merlant’s eyes are starving, surveying her subject with startling intensity on walks marked by what at first seems a muted disconnect. But Haenel’s unflinching return of this gaze, striking and discomforting in equal measure, balances them. For the first time, each is seen wholly and generously by another. The artist and her muse become something else entirely, a billowing collaboration that is at once subtle and thrilling, eternal and fleeting, unbearably breathless and overwhelmingly tranquil.
Sciamma succeeds wildly here in her stated intention to melt away the concept of the muse (a dynamic mirrored in her real-life relationship with Haenel), to dismantle this aspect of the male gaze which has for so long denied women credit for their contributions to art by steeping the role in voguish passivity. So while much of the film is indeed achingly tender, the element of its title is not smoldering but raging; a beguiling bonfire nevertheless threatening to blow out of control at any moment and set the world ablaze. Sciamma is furious, but her anger is so fiercely controlled that the winding effect of each point made is felt only after the fact. Cinematic in itself is her ability to stab the audience, in rapid succession, her portrayal of the unjust so precise that one does not realize they are bleeding until they look down to see a shirt soaked red and a heart on the floor.
The emotional impact of Portrait of a Lady on Fire is made all the more impressive by the manner in which it is told. Although the vast majority of the film is staged exclusively on that island in Brittany, it is bookended by segments of Marianne set several years later. A breathless and cherished memory, in other words, comprises most of the duration. But this framing device that typically neuters a film of its stakes frees Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Marianne is teaching painting to a group of young women, and one of her students inquires about a piece at the classroom’s rear. The canvas, positioned so that Marianne can stare at it over her pupils’ head, sees a woman facing away from the viewer with flames creeping up the train of her dress (it is the titular portrait!!!). Merlant’s indescribable expression at being asked promises the imminent divulgence of something epic and untouchable, despite an end that was at its time inevitable. Sciamma is obsessed with the inevitable, and hurtles the film towards the only conclusion that it could possibly reach with daring assuredness. And yet resignation, somehow, is never expressed. The beauty is not in whether something will last and for how long, but in that it happened at all.
Sciamma and Haenel and Merlant (with the assistance of a heartbreaking and underrated Luána Barjami as Héloïse’s maid) have together crafted the most elegant love story perhaps ever put to film. Comparisons to Phantom Thread and Call Me By Your Name are at once truthful and reductive, as Portrait of a Lady on Fire is truly the first of its kind-- a Romanticism painting ripped from its gilded frame and allowed to become something both new and old. And while (as many reviews have already stated) every shot could be frozen and hung in the Louvre, it is the closeups of Marianne’s cautious hand sketching and painting and committing Héloïse to the canvas that are the most breathtaking for there is nothing more perilous than to be seen as Marianne does Héloïse and as Héloïse does Marianne. There is so much more to say about this film; a wrenching parallel to Eurydice and Orpheus, most notably; but these are beats best experienced for one’s self. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is mythic..