The casting of Eddie Redmayne as James Glaisher, in “The Aeronauts,” is an excellent joke. Glaisher was a solidly built Victorian Englishman, whose whiskers suggested an amateur interest in forestry. By 1862, when the bulk of the movie takes place, he was fifty-three, married, and employed as the superintendent of the Magnetic and Meteorological Department at the Royal Observatory, in Greenwich. He was also a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Glaisher of the film, by contrast, is a shy bachelor who pays dutiful visits to his parents and struggles to persuade his scientific comrades to take him seriously. And Redmayne is, well, Redmayne—spookily youthful, febrile, feather-slim, and sensitive to every gust of emotion. You half expect him to be borne away on the breeze.
The film is written by Jack Thorne and directed by Tom Harper. It is also linked, by the loosest of guy ropes, to “Falling Upwards,” Richard Holmes’s buoyant survey of ballooning pioneers. Glaisher is a hero of the book, one highlight being his ascent, on September 5, 1862, to what was then a world-record height of some seven miles above the Earth. His duties were mainly instrumental: taking readings of temperature, atmospheric pressure, and so forth. Beside him was one Henry Coxwell, who piloted the balloon; of the brave and experienced Mr. Coxwell, however, not a trace remains onscreen. His role is subsumed into that of the fictitious and flamboyant—though thankfully not inflammable—Amelia Wren (Felicity Jones). The widow of another balloonist, she knows (a) how to launch the lovely gas-filled globe and steer it toward the heavens, and (b) no fear.
The action is divided between land and sky, and the sky is the runaway winner. Many of the scenes at ground level are frequented by disputatious gents in top hats, although the departure of the aeronauts, at the outset, is a rowdy spectacle—fireworks, a cheering mob, and a dog named Posey, who, flung from the balloon, parachutes to terra firma without a yap. As for Wren, she rolls up like a circus performer, with rouged cheeks, and turns cartwheels in a frothy skirt. (Later, when the crowds are far below, she dons oilskins to keep out the cold.) The movie is nodding, I guess, to the French balloonist Sophie Blanchard, who rose to fame in the Napoleonic age, favoring a silver gondola in place of a basket, and plunged to her death in 1819, when the rockets that she gaily, if unwisely, included in her act ignited the balloon.
The uneasy tussle between theatricality and solemn purpose—unsurprising, given that new means of exploration tend to be low on funds—is a constant theme in “Falling Upwards,” and it pretty much defines the curious mood of Harper’s film. Whereas the real Glaisher was absorbed in scholarly measurings, the movie’s Glaisher seems desultory and discursive, taking time out for a chat about marriage and other terrestrial niceties. As the air thins, though, and the chill intensifies, he slumps to the floor of the basket, insensible, leaving Miss Wren, flying solo, to save the day.
This she does. The gas valve at the top of the globe gets frozen stuck, making descent impossible, so she clambers up the rigging and grabs the rope netting that envelops the balloon like a string bag around a pumpkin. Then she circumcrawls her own floating world (I found myself thinking of the Little Prince) and collapses at its north pole, though not before stamping the valve open. Here’s the paradox: the closer “The Aeronauts” gets to peak silliness, the more beautiful it becomes. The whole crawling sequence is a travesty; in reality, the valve did stick, but Coxwell, unable to use his frosty fingers, yanked the appropriate cord with his teeth. In reaching these heights of fancy, however, the movie achieves, to use one of Glaisher’s own words, “rarefaction.” If you recall the medieval balloon that swept over the Russian landscape at the start of Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev” (1966), you may, briefly, feel the same desperate, lyrical rush as you watch the miraculous ascension of Amelia Wren. At this altitude, she is oxygenated by pure pluck. You hold your breath, for she has none to hold.
There is a fine moment, all the more striking for its simplicity, in Céline Sciamma’s new film, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” Two lovers, on the verge of consummating their desire, exchange what sound like sweet nothings. “You dreamt of me?” one asks. “No,” the other says, “I thought of you.” The moment is, in fact, a sweet something—a kind of duel. A romantic idea of love crosses swords with a classical notion: the urge to swoon, in forgetfulness of everything else, meets the clear-eyed claims of rational concentration. Both attitudes, as befits a story set in France in the autumn of the eighteenth century, have much to be said for them. Love lays down rules that it delights to break.
This is Sciamma’s first venture into historical drama. Her previous movie, “Girlhood” (2014), was about black teen-age girls, and the lure of gang culture, in the suburbs of modern Paris. The new film is about young white gentlewomen, and the demands of art, on the remote shores of Brittany. Any prospect that the change of scene might make for more placid viewing is dispelled within minutes, as a painter named Marianne (Noémie Merlant) leaps fully clothed into a lurching sea. She is being rowed by sailors (the last men we will glimpse for a couple of hours) toward a beach, but the flat wooden crate containing her canvases—her livelihood—is washed overboard, and she hastens to rescue it as she would a drowning child. Nothing is said or shouted, the editing is fiercely concise, and we realize that we are in the presence of a determined soul.
Marianne has a job to do. She must climb a cliff, make her way to a half-empty house, dry off, settle in, and paint a portrait of a young woman (Adèle Haenel). The portrait, too, has a job: it is to be sent to the woman’s intended husband, in Milan. Immediately, we sense the grip of a social contract. The woman is being advertised, like a product, to a man who presumably wants an accurate description of what he will soon possess. But there’s a hitch. The woman—taciturn, angry, and tense with pride—refuses to pose. A previous artist tried to depict her and failed, leaving behind, on an unfinished canvas, a figure without a face. All of which means that, as the woman’s mother (Valeria Golino) explains, Marianne’s mission is an unusually delicate one: “You must paint her without her knowing.”
What a great premise for a film. We are accustomed to hidden cameras, but how do you paint on the sly? Witness Marianne, crouched in the lee of a rock beside the ocean, roughing out a secret sketch of her subject, like a drinker swigging in shame. At last, she admits to her ruse, and shows the completed work. “Is that me?” the young woman asks, not scorning Marianne’s skill so much as questioning her presumption, as if to say, “Just because you’ve captured my likeness, what makes you think you’ve captured me? What if I don’t want to be caught?” It’s no accident that three-quarters of an hour pass before we learn her name, Héloïse.
Now and then, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” acquires the dryness of a tract. Marianne, for example, asked why women are forbidden to draw naked men, replies, “It’s mostly to prevent us from doing great art.” Professors of film theory should brace themselves for an avalanche of graduate theses on the female gaze in the cinema of Céline Sciamma. For the most part, however, the tale is defiantly tactile. It couldn’t be fresher if it were mixed on a palette in front of us, and the intensity with which, in the second half, the two women look themselves into love, as it were, is fleshly, funny, and sublimely _un_theoretical. What they embark upon, once the bindings of polite behavior are unlaced, is less a gratification than a creative act; as Héloïse says, “Do all lovers feel they’re inventing something?” If you admire the Rokeby Venus—Velázquez’s languid nude, who regards herself in a mirror, held up by a helpful Cupid—but believe that it merits a response, consider Marianne. Placing a circular looking glass against the groin of the naked Héloïse, she uses it to draw herself, on the page of a book that her beloved will read and keep.
Throughout, the two of them are waited on by a maid, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami). Bit by bit, her servility softens into companionship, and the three women play a merry game of cards. There’s also an extraordinary sequence, more tearful than gruesome, in which Sophie has an abortion at the hands of a local elder. (The impregnator is never mentioned.) While she heals, she is waited upon, in her turn, by Marianne and Héloïse; as one of them says, “Equality is a pleasant feeling.” For an instant, I heard the rumble of the coming Revolution, and wondered how Sciamma would conclude her engrossing movie. In violent devastation, perhaps? Well, yes, but the violence is that of a storm-tossed heart, and the final shot is of a woman—I won’t reveal who—shaken by ungovernable sobs, with smiles breaking through like shafts of sunlight. Reckon you can weather all that without falling apart? Good luck. ♦
