My mother has always said that I am too romantic. Not in a cheesy Hollywood way of grand gestures of love, as any previous girlfriend can attest, but in an idealistic way of hoping that the world and the people in it would act in a way to be their best selves.
The Portrait of a Lady on Fire (French: Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) (dir. Céline Sciamma) finds Marianne (Noémie Merlant), a young painter commissioned to paint a portrait of a reluctant subject in Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). Héloïse does not know about this arrangement and thinks that Marianne is purely just a companion that is to go on walks with her. Héloïse is arranged to be married on the condition that the potential husband is happy with what he sees in the painting.
The rustic and sparse location of a remote island in Brittany in the late 18th century echos the minimalistic film making which invites the viewer to observe the subtleties of the direction as Marianne is observing Héloïse.
Observation and specifically gaze flow throughout this film. Marianne wants to understand her subject who has recently come back from a convent due to her sister’s untimely death but as Nietzsche wrote “if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you” and while she is looking at Héloïse, Héloïse is looking at her.
This interplay continues as these two women start to understand and appreciate the other more. Marianne, the passionate artist who sees the world as she wants it to be and Héloïse, who knows that if this painting goes well then she will be forced to marry a man she doesn’t know and believes she can never love.
These gazes can take a long time and it asks a lot of the audience sometimes. This is a film, it is not a movie. There are no quick cuts and snappy edits, it asks a lot of you. Once their relationship changes the film then ruminates on whose philosophy is better: that of Marianne, who believes in the poetry of life; or Héloïse, who believes that love is the most important thing.
Whether you think this film is successful or enjoyable might fully depend on whether you are a poet or a lover. I know that I still need to be less ‘romantic’ and do better at taking the world for what it is not I want it to be.
21 October 2019
Luke Meeken -Ruscoe