A review of the new French arthouse film “Portrait Of A Lady On Fire”
This wonderful French-language arthouse film is a rarity in the world of cinema: a work written and directed by a woman (Céline Sciamma) with cinematography by a woman (Claire Mathon) and a cast list – headed by Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel – in which men barely feature.
Set around 1770, it is located on a wind-swept island in Brittany where a young, dark-haired painter Marianne (Merlant) is commissioned to create a wedding portrait of similarly-aged, blonde-haired Héloïse (Haenel) under unusual circumstances. Headstrong Héloïse will not sit for the painting because she does not want to be married, so Marianne must pretend to be her walking companion and observe her subject in this surreptitious manner.
The film is cleverly titled because it is about the creation of a painting while simultaneously a picture of three women – the painter, her subject, and her subject’s maid – and because it literally has a woman in flames while at the same time showing women inflammed with lesbian love.
No doubt it helped that Mathon is an out lesbian and that, for a time before the shooting of this particular film, she was in a relationship with Haenel. In an interview, Mathon has said of cinema: “Ninety per cent of what we look at is the male gaze.” But all her work champions the female gaze and never more so than in this gem of a movie.
“Portrait Of A Lady On Fire” is a haunting work with sparse narrative, dialogue and cast-list that takes its time to build up the sexual tension. It evoked memories for me of a variety of other films.
In its slow depiction of the process of creating a female portrait, I was reminded of another French arthouse work “La Belle Noiseuse” (1991); in its dramatic use of part of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”, I recalled the Swedish film “Elvira Madigan” (1967); and, in the final extended shot of a woman’s face, I found an allusion to Greta Garbo at the very end of “Queen Christina” (1933).