I know this was technically released in 2019, but it wasn't available widely until 2020, so that's where this is getting grouped.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the new French queer romantic drama, begins with a beautiful young woman, Marianne, teaching a painting lesson to a group of girls in the late eighteenth century. One of the girls asks about an old painting of hers -- the one that gives the film its title -- and Marianne becomes visibly upset. When it started, I was a little annoyed that the film would use such a crude framing device to launch its story, for indeed we are immediately thrust into the past. Just because it's old-fashioned doesn't mean it has to be archaic. But I was soon to learn that this perfectly sets up the themes of loss, memory, and value in a romance that ends not in a pairing but in a painting. Which would, ultimately, last longer.
Previously, Marianne was hired and summoned to a rocky island on the French coast in order to paint a portrait of Heloise, a young woman recently brought home from her convent. The countess, Heloise's mother, is marrying her off to an aristocrat in Milan and has commissioned Marianne to paint her daughter's portrait. The problem is that Heloise does not want to sit for a portrait; we initially suspect she may be hopelessly spoiled or even mentally ill, a suspicion strengthened when the countess describes the death of Heloise's older sister, who fell from the cliff on the isolated island. Suicide, murder, or an accident? We never really know. The countess keeps Heloise under lock and key now, and charges Marianne with memorizing her daughter's features while acting as her companion, and painting in secret.
It's hard to know where to start discussing this film because its peaceful facade belies a deceptively complex work that deals with, I think, unusual themes for a romance. Writer and director Céline Sciamma effortlessly floats between genre here, setting up romance, Gothic drama, feminist history, and even a comedy of manners, but keeping everything clear and sensual in each frame. Much as Marianne labors to capture the beauty of her subject, Sciamma turns every shot into a work of art that draws special attention to the empty spaces of rooms, beaches, and between bodies. Art is always intimate, but art that requires watching and studying other people is especially so -- even obsessive -- and when tied with the tactile nature of painting, it's easy to imagine transgression.
Here, we don't need to imagine it. Marianne and Heloise indeed develop unspeakable feelings for each other and finally act on it while the countess is away. But despite their romantic tension bursting into sexual passion, Sciamma doesn't dive into pornographic scenes (this is, thank heaven, not the deeply troubling French Blue is the Warmest Color from 2013); in fact, this film seems a gentle but firm rejection of that exploitative male gaze. In fact, Sciamma has seemingly made the film remarkably absent of men -- when they appear, they are out of focus or shown only in part, with one pointed and unwelcome exception -- and equally of the male-dominated attempts at period romances, lesbian or not. Near the end, we learn Marianne occasionally sends her paintings to exhibits under her father's name in order for them to be shown. So much of the film is wordless, caught in looks and gestures, and there is almost no music except during a witchy dance around a beachside bonfire in the film's climactic scene from which it takes its titular inspiration. This movie tries hard to surprise you in an understated way, one that silently grabs hold of you and refuses to let go.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire might be a manifesto of the female gaze, as Sciamma has declared, but it is also a consummate work of art that, yes, dooms its characters to a broken-up romance a la Call Me By Your Name. The final scene of both films nails that point home. But we also learn by the end a lesson about art therapy and the ways in which art, encapsulating memory, freedom, ambition, tradition, and of course love, is a creative balm that will last far longer than any fleeting romance. The painting Marianne creates reminds her of her valid feelings and memories. The experience of the film, for its characters and for us, is that of female solidarity, one that never panders to its 2019/2020 audience even as it comments on abortion, queer rights, gender inequality, inaccessibility to work, etc. But it is in the film's consideration of what Heloise calls "the poet's choice" that the film works unexpected magic: tying the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into their hearts and minds, the characters make a breakthrough realization of the central problem of that story. Doing so, they turn their own story into high art.
No comments:
Post a Comment