Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciamma, 2019)

Portrait of a Lady on Fire was one of the few films whose praise was resounding enough to register on my radar during my self-imposed 15-year hiatus from cinema. And yet I wonder if the praise was indeed resounding. enough. Director Céline Sciamma’s seductively languorous, quietly-revolutionary tribute to womanhood is a portrait that fires on all cylinders. A perceptive redressing of the relations between artist and subject, Sciamma democratises the act of looking, her decision to dispense with a soundtrack and to revel in silence forcing her audience to immerse themselves in the film’s majestic emotional plane, ably visualised on the faces of her female lovers — faces the director lingers on, studies, much as the characters themselves do to one another. Marianne, commissioned to paint young noblewoman Héloïse’s wedding portrait, occupies a position of nominal authority given the task at hand, but her model refuses passive objectification, demanding agency within the image-making process, and memorably pointing out that two humans bound to a confined space are equally capable of seeing one another. In dismantling these conventional power dynamics, Sciamma creates liberation, and into that space her film soars: her visuals composed with appropriately-painterly flair, her narrative threads splaying into numerous lines of inquiry. What exactly does a portrait capture? Can art preserve what’s ceased to exist? Is it better to possess imperfectly or to cherish a perfect memory (Portrait brilliantly flips the Orpheus & Eurydice myth when posing this)? What is liberation in a society where women’s roles are both preordained and circumscribed? Can freedom truly occur under such a framework? The film’s heroines survive precariously, on a secluded island but for only a limited time, seemingly devoid of male scrutiny but with patriarchal oppression nonetheless palpable (most tellingly via Héloïse’s mother who functions as executor for the only system she can understand). Still, with the female gaze firmly centred, they’re able to carve out a fleeting utopia for themselves: one of Sciamma’s most beautiful shots features the two lovers and their sympathetic housemaid at a kitchen table, an image of domestic bliss, a palliative sorority achievable only through the (temporary) absence of men. It’s into that space that a love story like this can exist; a love so organic, so emancipating, so life-giving that one wonders why any other love should exist at all. But this is the 18th century, and as far as mainstream society is concerned, it cannot, must not exist. (How many other nascent romances have been laid waste throughout history for these very reasons?) And so we return to Orpheus and Eurydice. A mere memory — or a portrait — is no substitution for a living, breathing love, but it can allow us to clasp onto something in the absence of the flame. We know full well that holding on will cause pain, induce tears, maybe even prevent us from ever moving forward, and yet we hold on regardless, determined to resist evanescence, to preserve that glimpse of perfection for as long as we possibly can. Is that an error of judgment? A human failing? Or is it the greatest expression of pure, unadulterated love that we’re capable of? Perhaps Orpheus really did choose to look back.