Portrait of a Lady On Fire
Burgeoning Feelings and Temporal Limitations
Celine Sciamma often makes films about tentative loves and burgeoning feelings, whether it is the young white swimmers of Water Lilies in Cergy-Pontoise, the black teens in the highrises of Bagnolet in Girlhood, or the little girl who moves to a new town and experiments with being male in Tomboy. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, that tentativeness is played out in the late 18th century on a Brittany island, with portrait painter Marianne (Noemi Merlant), hired to paint Heloise (Adele Haenel) before the latter marries a Milanese nobleman. In a variation of the Hopi Indians who don’t want their souls stolen by a photograph, Heloise doesn’t want her portrait taken because it will signal that she is ready to be married and risk losing her soul. If the notion of marrying an Italian count might be the sort of tale to feed many a romantic fantasy, here it is the product of a nightmare. Heloise has been hiding out in a convent, but now must see the light of day as she is the only one now capable of being married off. Her sister resisted the urge fundamentally, taking her own life.
Speaking with the novelist Annie Ernaux, with Ernaux living for many years in the new town of Cergy-Pontoise, which is outside Paris, and where Sciamma was brought up, Sciamma says ‘‘Cergy’s approach to urban planning, separating pedestrians from cars, meant that children, myself included, had a lot of freedom to move through the city.’’ Sciamma adds, At the same time, limits to that freedom arrived very early, when I began to feel strongly attracted to girls: a forbidden desire. At the outset, you’re alone with your desire. It’s not written about in books, it isn’t in people’s imaginations; it doesn’t exist in your family and it doesn’t have a name.’’ (The Dial) Sciamma was born in 1978, two centuries after the story in Portrait of a Lady On Fire, and would have had no need to take her life to avoid a heterosexual fate, yet generally, what interests the director is trying to find stories that contain the illicit and allow the characters to explore the contours of their feelings within the limits of societal expectation. Society’s interdictions may change, and sometimes the censorial may be more familial or peer-oriented than societal, but the tentativeness will remain.
It is a way of looking at Portrait of a Lady on Fire without arriving at easy historical hindsight, without assuming that we now live in more enlightened times where women needn’t take their lives if they believe it is the only way to escape marriage. Enlightenment takes many forms and depends on the time and the place. It is not a straight line. Sciamma makes clear that she wasn’t free to express her desire as a teenager in the early 1990s, and only last year, the Hindustan Times reported that ‘‘An 18-year-old woman died by suicide in Kerala's Malappuram district a day before her wedding. The woman was in a relationship with her 19-year-old neighbour. However, her family arranged a different match for her, and she was engaged a week before the wedding. Upset over this, the teenager hanged herself on the terrace of her uncle's home, where she lived after her father's death.’’ Sciamma is talking about her life only thirty years ago, and she is living in a slightly more enlightened France. The article says, though, that the very subject matter of Portrait of a Lady on Fire is still relevant in the Indian context.
Yet what partly makes the film resist the hindsight that threatens any story set in the past, which contains within it a more oppressive environment than the audience is likely to be in, is that it is wary of an emancipatory narrative and instead explores a more subjective one. Within the physical relationship that does actually take place between Marianne and Heloise, another develops that might just allow both Marianne and Heloise to accept that their affair may be fleeting, but their feelings towards it are much longer lasting. While at first art might be deemed an act of oppression, as Marianne is hired to provide a painting that will be the initial stage of Heloise’s marriage, by the conclusion, it may itself be the mode in which feelings are simultaneously expressed and contained. In a scene 70 minutes into the film, Heloise reads the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to Marianne and the housemaid, Sophie (Luana Bajrami). Sophie is dismayed by the tale and can’t understand why Orpheus turned to face Eurydice just before they would become free, and consequently loses her forever. The maid says that Orpheus was warned that if he did so, she would be lost to him, and while she might have understood him doing so for a reason (perhaps if she stumbled and needed help), he clearly did so stupidly and gratuitously. Marianne reads it differently, saying that maybe he chooses the memory of her instead. By turning round, he loses her only in body, but not in spirit and mind: ‘’He doesn’t make the lover’s choice. He makes the poet’s.’’
By the end of the film, we may assume this is the choice that Marianne and Heloise have made: Marianne explicitly, Heloise implicitly. While earlier, Marianne and Heloise talk, and Heloise admits that she had never heard an orchestra, at the conclusion, Marianne sees her for the first time in years, long after Heloise's marriage. It is at a Vivaldi concert, and, from Marianne’s point of view, the camera slowly moves in Heloise’s face, as Sciamma holds the shot for two and a half minutes. It is the closing shot of the film. A little earlier, at an exhibition where we see an example of Marianne’s work, we also see her looking at a portrait of Heloise with her daughter, aged around five. The camera movement goes from Heloise’s face and down towards the child, in another point of view . In Marianne’s painting (exhibited under her father’s name) at the show, a viewer says to her that he finds her work interesting. It is of Orpheus and Eurydice, but while most paintings of the lovers show Orpheus before he turns, Marianne’s illustrates that he is facing his lover. It reflects, of course, what Marianne earlier says to Sophie and Heloise about why he turns: that he chooses poetry over practicality. It isn’t that moment before it all goes wrong; it is the moment when Orpheus has defiantly made his decision.
We needn’t reduce the film to the autobiographical, but when thinking of the conversation between Ernaux and Sciamma, we can think about questions of power, and how they play out according to different sensibilities and different eras. Sciamma says, ‘‘In a very fluid way I managed to structure my life around the work of writing and creating, things I had always aspired to. It was an incredible luxury. I’m not inoculated against the norm, and that expresses itself sometimes through renunciation, like refusing to have a family, for instance. But these are decisions I made lucidly.’’ (The Dial) But it is important to understand the choices available to women at various moments in time. Ernaux speak as a woman of her era, a woman coming of age in the still conservative France of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, where abortion was illegal and where women had only recently received the vote in 1944. She wanted to write but found herself with a husband and two children, and then had to fight her way free of certain obligations, all the better to find room to do so. Though Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the tale of two women, and though Heloise’s tale is the one that drives the story and gives it its sense of urgency, the one that provides its pertinence is more Marianne’s. A tale of a woman obliged to marry, face the convent, or try and live with a scandal, is far from a new story, and has been dealt with brilliantly in the French context by Jacques Rivette in, especially in The Nun, and also The Duchess of Langeais. If Rivette is an influence on Sciamma, it is probably more for La belle noiseuse. As Courtney Duckworth notes, ‘‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire finds a new angle on this story of artist and muse. Here, ‘Marianne’ changes from the name of the muse in Rivette’s film to that of the artist; and though for Marianne to limn her lover is also to end their love, seeing each other plain entangles the two forever in a shared remembrance. ‘’ (Reverse Shot)
In Rivette’s film, the question of painting becomes one of ethics and aesthetics, of the sovereign right of the artist, and the potentially devastating psychic impact on the exposed muse. The artist decides to dash off another, which will be for public consumption, and keeps the real work hidden. In Sciamma’s film, the completion of the painting means the end of Heloise’s life as a free woman, but it is also simultaneously revealing the freedoms available to the woman who is painting her. When Heloise asks Marianne when she will marry, Marianne says she doesn’t know if she will. Also, on completing this commission, Heloise’s mother, the Countess, will give her another one: to paint a very ugly friend of hers in Paris. As Heloise’s options close down, Marianne’s will open up. This is an important dimension of a work that can be understandably read as feminist and female-oriented. It was written and directed by Sciamma, photographed by Claire Mathon, and all the leading roles are played by women. Isabel Stevens headed her Sight and Sound interview with Sciamma, ‘No Man’s Land’. But we might question Stevens’ claim that ‘‘the director presents a female-centred vision of equality, solidarity, romance and sex.’’ If this is a partial escape from a patriarchal society, then women are nevertheless not outside of power dynamics, and Marianne and Heloise’s relationship within it is not the same. Her mother is behind the decision to find a wealthy noble for her daughter, and Marianne may be from poorer stock than Heloise, but she will raise herself by fulfilling this commission. Sciamma says, ‘I found out there was an amazing moment in art history in the second part of the 18th century, just before the French Revolution, when there was a rise of a female artistic scene, because of the fashion for portraits. There were hundreds of women painters at that time.’’ (Sight and Sound). This was the moment that Marianne could exploit, just as in the early 21st century, Sciamma could become one of many female filmmakers in an industry that for much of its history had only a handful. People have greater or fewer opportunities, given the circumstances of their time. This was one when a woman like Marianne had a small number, but Heloise remained rather more constrained, just as Ernaux was more constrained than Sciamma, partly because Ernaux was a heterosexual woman of the post-war years; Sciamma, a gay woman at the turn of the millennium.
We could conclude that both Marianne and Heloise choose art, and that Marianne’s reading of Orpheus and Eurydice proves equally valid for each of them, though in different ways. Marianne looks like she is becoming a successful painter and teacher, while Heloise gets to access the culture she couldn’t on the island. If she is still unhappy, then her yearning possesses an outlet. She might not be able to say, as Marianne does, when a student portrays her as sad, that she isn’t any longer, but Heloise can find the depth of her feelings in the music that she listens to at the Vivaldi concert. We don’t doubt that this isn’t a one-off cultural outing, and her love for both art and Marianne is suggested when, in that painting with her daughter, she is holding a book that is surely the one she was reading out when retelling the myth. They might not quite have each other – the times wouldn’t quite allow for that – but they do have art.
Speaking of her choice of subject, Sciamma says, ‘‘I decided to go for a painter because it’s more cinematic. So it’s not just about the artist expressing themselves. Painting allows you to see them at work – you see the layers and the concentration.’’ (Sight and Sound) Just as certain sports seem more cinematic than others (boxing over football; basketball over tennis), so painting is a better subject than literature, dance over theatre. Of course, it depends on the director, and none other than Rivette created marvellous films invoking the theatre (including Paris nous apartient and L’amour fou), but Sciamma is surely correct to say that a filmmaker can use painting more than any other art form to convey the sense of their own craft. When John Orr proposed that another art may serve as a ‘mindscreen’ for the director’s own work, he reckoned that after 8 & 1/2 and Le Mepris, there wasn’t much more to say about films about filmmaking, and the director had to find a different way of approaching the relationship with their art form self-reflexively. One of these ways is, of course, through painting, as Orr speaks of The Draughtsman’s Contract, Caravaggio and indeed La belle Noiseuse. Orr reckons the advantage with this is that ‘‘the other form cannot simply be a mirror of filmmaking since both forms contribute to the finished image. Each form must have its partial autonomy, its special world and its special way of representing that world, or of failing to do so.’’ (Contemporary Cinema)
In one scene, after apparently completing the portrait, Marianne decides to erase Heloise’s face. The literary version of this rejection is usually the scrunched-up piece of paper that ends up in the bin. Here she turns an adequate depiction into a smear, and rather than the cliched image of the writer at work, frustrated, Sciamma, working with painting, registers a modern form, as if by frustrated accident. When Heloise says that she doesn’t feel the painting has captured her, Marianne insists that ‘‘there are rules, conventions, ideas.’’ But she doesn’t so much reject the rules, as many a modern painter would do, but registers her irritation with them and creates an accidental Francis Bacon. We see the smeared face briefly, as the film cuts from Marianne wiping it away with a cloth, to the Countess (Valeria Golino). The countess is seen from behind, and her face initially blocks the painting, but when she turns around, looking livid as she walks off, we see the image, a light blur, as the film doesn’t pull focus to reveal the painting clearly. Sciamma holds the shot as Heloise enters the frame, looks at the painting, turns and has an expression of what appears like amused relief, even admiration. Sciamma acknowledges that female portrait painters were not unheard of at the time, but they were still constrained by formal and social demands. This Baconesque gesture erases more than the face on a portrait: it anticipates the art of the future, an emancipation of painting, just as in time many women would be emancipated as well.
In such an instance, we can see why Sciamma would regard painting as an art form that can be cinematic, as writing would not be, which isn’t to say there aren’t innovative ways to film the writer at work. After all, Le Mepris isn’t only a film about filmmaking; it is also a film about a writer, and other very fine films about the writing process, or the lack of it, include Claire’s Knee, La Dolce vita, Sunset Boulevard and Tales of Ordinary Madness. But none of them are about writing, as we can note Lust for Life, La Belle Noiseuse, Andrei Rublev, The Quince Tree Sun and, yes, Caravaggio and The Draughtsman’s Contract are about painting. The former films are as good as the latter, but they feel almost incidentally about writing, as the latter are centrally about painting. Various scenes in Portrait of a Lady on Fire capture the light of painters such as Vermeer and De la Tour. Sciamma and Mathon, ‘‘felt the need to go see paintings of the eighteenth century. But we were not looking for direct references, nor to imitate a particular painter. I remember one visit to the Louvre where we mainly looked at the textures, the material, the touch and the precision of the renderings.’ Mathon adds, but ‘’Our pictorial inspirations were not limited to eighteenth century painting.’’ (Film and Digital Times) It would seem odd, perhaps, for a filmmaker to say that they went to various libraries to read writers before making a film about one of them, and in this claim, we might see why painting can be such a good subject for cinema.
It also gives Sciamma the opportunity to develop her recurrent themes in a new way and find a visual approach distinct from her earlier work. It isn’t just that this is an 18th-century story, though that will be part of it. While Water Lillies, Tomboy and Girlhood are contemporary works that will have little need for gallery visits as the world filmed is in the one in front of the filmmakers’ eyes, Portrait of a Lady on Fire isn’t only about a painter, but inevitably influenced by painting to understand the world it shows us. In a sense, all films set before the mid-to-late 19th century are painterly works, just as we might wonder if films set in the past after this moment are photographic ones. When someone makes a film about World War II or Vietnam, the 1930s Depression or 1950s British austerity, it is unlikely they will look to painters for inspiration. Painting may never have become obsolete after photography, but it became very much secondary as a means of record. The drawing, for example, will still often be used in courts, but this isn’t because they are seen as ‘better’ than photographs – just that courts refuse to allow cameras in. Anybody wishing to convey a given period, and who has the choice between photographs or paintings to access it, would be inclined to opt for the latter. Obviously, if a filmmaker wants to abstract from the photographic nature of the filmic medium qualities – like light and colour – they might be drawn to painters, as Antonioni was to Rothko, Godard to De Stael. But this would be for the aesthetic aspect of the work, not the documentary dimension. Certainly, filmmakers will not only go to paintings when making a period film for their capacity to register fact, but they have no choice but to go to them if they want to understand certain information of the period.
But they will also seek them out to access feeling. While Kubrick with Barry Lyndon offered the sombre, and Minnelli in Lust for Life the exuberant, Portrait of a Lady on Fire frequently seeks crisp, sharp light, and bright colours, during the day, and mellow, soft, and gentle tones for the evening. We don’t doubt that Marianne has the perfect conditions in which to paint Heloise, as the daylight offers perfect conditions for portrait photography, even though she has the worst initial conditions for painting her subject, as Heloise refuses to pose. Yet Sciamma could say that while Marianne had more opportunities than most women might have been expected to have in the late 18th century, no matter the occasional recalcitrant model, her own are far greater. Not only as a woman with vastly more freedom than a woman then, but also it could be argued as a filmmaker rather than as a portrait painter. Whatever the limitations placed on filmmakers – that cinema is a technological medium constrained by financial demand – there Sciamma is filming on various locations, and with the chance to do portraits, landscapes, chiaroscuro, sfumato, contrapposto, foreshortening, pentimento and other techniques from painting that can be translated cinematically, even if they might seem usually to serve very different functions. For example, foreshortening can find its correlative in the diopter lens, pentimento in a dissolve, chiaroscuro in light coming through a set of blinds on a film set. How much these devices become simply a convention of film grammar, or an element that contains its traces in fine art, depends on the filmmaker, but they are there as options.
In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma uses a variation of the sfumato when she refuses to rack focus on the smeared painting and leaves it as background blur, while giving some of her close-ups the quality of portraits, and her establishing shots and long shots the sense of a landscape. If Heloise is reluctant to pose initially for Marianne, there is in Haenel’s look a defiant insistence that she meets the camera’s gaze, turning the close up less into something that is insisted upon by the filmmaker, and bashfully offered by the actress (as we find in Godard’s wonderful yet very different use of Anna Karina), but perhaps a version of the female gaze as feminist vision. As Sciamma says, ‘‘the artist is not dominant—she is being looked at as much as she looks.’’ (Film Comment) This wouldn’t only be about the director choosing to offer one that seems contrary to the male gaze (for example, feminising the masculine, or making more masculine the feminine, as one sometimes sees in Kelly Reichardt or Katheryn Bigelow), but one that on the actor’s part defiantly offers a look of their own. Heloise eventually accepts the idea of sitting for Marianne, but this becomes less acquiescence than a certain form of defiance. She gives the close-up a look that looks back. As Sciamma says, ‘’I wanted to portray the intellectual dialogue and not to forget that there are several brains in the room. We see how art history reduces the collaboration between artists and their companions: before, a muse was this fetishized, silent, beautiful woman sitting in the room.’’ Sciamma says that ‘‘we now know that Dora Maar, the “muse” of Picasso, was this great Surrealist photographer. And Gabrièle Buffet-Picabia, the companion of Francis Picabia, was intensely involved in his evolution. I wanted to portray the reality of that in the process of actually making a film in strong collaboration with my actresses.’ (Film Comment) While much is made in the Orpheus story of the hero looking back at Eurydice and losing her, the emphasis rests on his look and not hers. When Marianne leaves the island and Heloise to her fate, we see her rushing away and then suddenly looking behind her. She sees Heloise on the stairs in the distance, meeting her gaze firmly.
If this shows Sciama absorbing the portrait as close-up, and exploring it within the context of feminism, several moments suggest the landscape, including one where we see Marianne, Heloise and the maid all in extreme high-angle long shot on the beach: a scene viewed from the cliffs and looking down on the three characters, small in the frame. Shortly afterwards, the three of them are searching in the high grass nearby, and the shot moves from an empty landscape to one where the three of them rise up from the grass while looking for a particular plant before it flowers. The third shows Heloise standing amidst rocks, by the beach, the sea swirling. The question isn’t which paintings these shots invoke (the second might bring to mind Millet; the third has an air of Caspar David Friedrich), but that they invoke painting at all. Many shots in film do not echo the history of the image, but are contained within the pragmatics of their story. It isn’t simply that Sciamma has made a period drama that suggests inevitably the presence of the painterly (otherwise we wouldn’t see its presence in contemporary-set films by Antonioni and Godard) but it has perhaps given an added visual aspect to her work as she continues to explore those tentative loves and burgeoning feelings, and also adds to this exploration the presence of another art form within her own. This needn’t be a respect for an older art form that precedes cinema, but a way perhaps of seeing within cinema, both new possibiliies and an escape from oppressive cinematic expectation. As Sciamma says, ‘‘I don’t watch films while making films because you know it’s contagious. There’s too much authority in what has been made before. I think you should invent the language of the film you’re making.’’ (BFI) Portrait of a Lady on Fire uses painting to help that invention along, telling a story exclusively about women at a time when they would have been deemed very peripheral indeed.
© Tony McKibbin