“Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” Céline Sciamma’s drama of the personal and creative relationship of a painter and her subject, is unusually dominated by a single figure of cinematic style: physical poise and stillness, exemplified in the fixity of a gaze. Coincidentally, it’s one of two new films that depend heavily on the play of the eye; the other is “The Irishman.” Both films deploy the gaze dramatically, as a mode of action, and historically, as a distillation of the time and place in which the movie is set.
In “Portrait,” which is set in eighteenth-century France, before the Revolution, an artist named Marianne (Noémie Merlant) undertakes a difficult sea voyage to reach an aristocratic family’s remote Brittany estate. There, a young woman of minor wealth named Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) is about to be married off to a Milanese nobleman, but there’s a catch: the would-be husband insists on having a portrait of her before their marriage. Héloïse’s mother (Valeria Golino) has summoned Marianne to do what another artist had recently failed to do—paint the portrait of Héloïse, who had refused to pose. The family is in mourning. Héloïse’s sister, who was about to be married, fell from a cliff, and the family’s young maid, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), believes that she killed herself to avoid the marriage. Marianne is introduced into the household on the pretext of being Héloïse’s walking companion, although, in the course of their strolls, Marianne must closely observe and furtively sketch her and complete the portrait in secrecy. But soon a friendship—and then a romantic relationship—develops, during a church-dominated time, of course, when homosexual relations were forbidden.
Sciamma, who also wrote the script, incisively builds the movie around memory, setting the entire action as a flashback from when Marianne is teaching a classroom of young women to paint, while a picture of Héloïse that she’d done (one bearing the title of the movie itself) hangs at the back of the studio. A student’s question about the painting sparks Marianne’s reminiscences of her brief time—two or three weeks—with Héloïse. Ingeniously, the very romance of memory and the beautiful melancholy of love and separation are built into the substance of the film, through readings from Ovid of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Marianne’s distinctive interpretation of it.
With a fine flourish, Sciamma doesn’t even introduce Héloïse until about twenty minutes into the movie—and she does so with an air of mystery. A long travelling shot from Marianne’s point of view follows her shrouded and hooded subject, seen only from behind, as the two walk together but separately toward the sea. Then they’re seated side by side on the sand, with the camera beside Marianne as she steals glances at Héloïse, who similarly turns her gaze stealthily at Marianne until, finally, they look at each other in a mutual stare that’s charged with a sudden glint of recognition.
From then on, the movie shifts, quietly but with enormous power, between the two women’s face-to-face stares (directly into the camera) and their side-by-side dialogues, and it’s the latter scenes that provide the movie with its thrilling tone of austere and elevated intensity. Sciamma composes static tableaux featuring Haenel and Merlant in poses that feel both spontaneous and taut, rigidly unnatural and utterly authentic. The two actresses are relentlessly graceful, endowed with physical aplomb, contemplative insight, and strong emotion.
It’s hardly a spoiler to say that the movie pivots, even before the women’s romantic connection begins, on the relationship of the artist and the model and, in particular, on Marianne’s confession to Héloïse that she’s been painting a portrait. The result of this new understanding is a transformation of the personal and the artistic bond—and of Marianne’s art itself, which, to that point, had been mainly technical and formal. With the revelation of Marianne’s artistic purpose, Héloïse becomes her willing and involved artistic collaborator—yet their intellectual and creative collaboration does not dilute the individuality of Marianne’s artistry but, rather, heightens it. The transformation of art from an applied technique to a vital experience—and a personal passion—is the drama’s crucial turn, and it inescapably brings to mind the artistic relationship of director and actor. Sciamma brings this to the fore in an extraordinary sequence in which Héloïse challenges Marianne’s position as the observer and her own place as the observed, and which gives rise to a simply constructed yet visually intricate game of gazes and mirrors that resounds with psychological and creative implications.
The very nature of women’s art and the marginalization of women in the art world are built into the movie via a subplot (an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion) in a way that echoes unmistakably with the present day. Marianne laments the exclusion of women artists from “great subjects,” and Héloïse is inspired to suggest abortion as a subject of art—and, by implication, a subject no less crucial to history and experience, and no less intrinsically political, than the martial pomp that was typical of official art. The movie dramatizes the constraints of the era, the imposition of a narrow and religion-based morality, the stern discipline that’s internalized as a result, the elision of women and their world from public life, and the firm expectations of family and society that Héloïse will endure in her unwanted marriage. Yet it does more than merely depict them—it embodies them, in the characters’ poised stillness, which makes the airy surroundings feel as rigid as stone. There is no way of knowing how men and women from the eighteenth century actually carried themselves, but Sciamma’s work with the actors here reflects an inspired effort—going far beyond costume and décor—to evoke the inner life of the historical period.
There’s also a peculiar scene—a sort of post-medieval rave on the beach, uniting genders and classes around a bonfire—where, in a foreshadowing of modern times, norms are loosened, emotions are vented, and postures and gestures are freed and slackened. Here, Sciamma nods toward the charm and grace that are dispelled along with painful constraint, and acknowledges the vanished aesthetic of wary control that comes with authentic progress. It’s as if she were looking back toward the classic cinema and noting its glories while recognizing its exclusions.
