Monthly Archives: October 2019

  • Portrait of a Lady on Fire

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Portrait de la jeune fille en feu

    Céline Sciamma (2019)

    In what’s become the best-known sequence of Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood (2014), the heroine and her friends dance to and lip-sync Rihanna’s song ‘Diamonds’.  Girlhood is set in present-day Paris and Sciamma’s new film in eighteenth-century France but a female chorus also features in the most vibrantly dramatic scene of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, showing at the London Film Festival after winning prizes at Cannes.  A group of women, on a beach close to the house where most of the action takes place, chant the words ‘Fugere non possum’ repeatedly and urgently.  It’s night-time; what light there is comes from the fire built on the beach.  The voices are lovely and the meaning of the Latin phrase (‘I can’t escape’) significant.  The seashore company includes, as well as the chorus, the film’s two main characters – the young artist Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), a near-contemporary whose portrait she’s been commissioned to paint.  Héloïse moves so close to the beach fire that the hem of her dress catches alight.  She gazes at Marianne, and into the camera, for some moments before falling to the ground.  Marianne and others run towards her to extinguish the flames.

    This scene is the centrepiece of the long flashback, in Marianne’s memory, that Portrait of a Lady on Fire mostly comprises.  The film’s opening sequence is the route into it.  Marianne is giving an art lesson to a group of six pupils – all girls, who look to be in their late teens.  She quietly instructs the class at the same time as sitting as their model.  When the lesson is over, she looks at a painting behind the row of girls and asks who was responsible for placing it there.   One of the pupils (Armande Boulanger) puts her hand up and asks if it was wrong for her to bring the painting out of storage.  Marianne confirms it was wrong, though in a tone of regret rather than reproof.  The camera, representing Marianne’s point of view, closes in on the painting, her own work, which shows a young woman whose dress hem is burning.  The flashback then begins.  Sciamma’s introduction has poise and gravitas though I didn’t get why, given the position in which she was sitting, Marianne seemed not to notice the painting until the end of the lesson.  This bugged me for a while until what followed in the film supplied a clear and simple answer.  Remarking the painting sooner would have spoiled the effect that Sciamma wanted to achieve.

    Portrait of a Lady on Fire builds to the love affair that develops between Marianne and Héloïse during the former’s painting of the latter’s portrait.  The affair lasts only the brief period of their acquaintance but is never forgotten by either of them.  ‘I can’t escape’, the film’s motto, refers both to the circumstances of eighteenth-century women and to the ineluctability of desire.  Héloïse, from an aristocratic family, is about to be married to a man previously engaged to her sister, who died suddenly.  We soon learn the sister took her own life.  Héloïse had been living in a convent, preparing to become a nun.  Her sister’s death – to be precise, her mother’s reaction to it – put an end to that.  The dowager countess (Valeria Golino) is determined that, since one of her daughters is no longer available to marry the eligible Italian gentleman in question, the other will.

    Marianne survives an eventful sea voyage en route to the countess’s isolated house off the Brittany coast:  when her canvases go overboard, she follows and rescues them.   (The sequence faintly echoes the climax to The Piano.)  On arrival at the house, she first meets the maid, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) and, soon afterwards, learns from the countess that the job of painting her daughter’s portrait, for the approval of her prospective husband, is a more complicated assignment than expected.   Héloïse has previously refused to sit for a portrait because she doesn’t want to be married.  Marianne will therefore be introduced to her as a hired companion to accompany Héloïse on daily walks – in order to see her at close quarters and commit her features to memory.  Marianne will then construct the portrait alone, at night.

    She and Héloïse soon bond; the painter is not prepared to deceive her subject and explains her presence in the household.  To her mother’s surprise, Héloïse agrees to be painted and the countess then departs for Italy.  A good deal happens during her seemingly short absence.  Héloïse and Marianne help the pregnant Sophie to have an abortion.  Following the chanting sequence on the beach, they fall in love.  The portrait of Héloïse is completed.  This isn’t, of course, the ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ seen in the prologue but a more conventional study, which in due course meets with the countess’s approval.

    Until Héloïse and Marianne express their mutual passion, the atmosphere exudes quivering, suppressed ardency, reflected in the looks the women exchange, in flickering firelight and candle flames.  This is an exceptionally beautiful film to look at.  The contrast between the DP Claire Mathon’s lighting of shadowy interiors and the translucent vividness of colours in the sunny, seaside outdoors is close to breathtaking.  The film is full of artful touches and rhymes.  Marianne is haunted by visions of Héloïse in a white gown.  The visions are spectral but the last time we see Héloïse in the gown, it really is her wedding dress.   One evening, Héloïse reads to Marianne (and Sophie) the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and there’s a discussion of why Orpheus really turned back.  When, later, the distraught Marianne is about to exit the countess’s house for the last time, she hears Héloïse’s voice calling behind her; Marianne turns, Orpheus-like. Waiting for the abortionist to do her work, Sophie lies on a bed and a newborn crawls on the pillow beside her.  (The abortionist is evidently a baby farmer too.)  Years after their romance, Marianne sees an updated portrait of Héloïse, now with an infant daughter, hanging in a gallery.  Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an impressive composition.  As a drama, though, it’s inert.  Sciamma, in illustrates the social restriction of her characters, locks them into her own schematic.

    Among the people in the gallery where she sees the portrait of Héloïse as a mother, and where her own latest work (a depiction of Orpheus and Eurydice!) is also on display, Marianne seems to be a lone woman among men.   Her solitude in this company draws attention to questions that, for me, remained unanswered at the end of the film.  How unusual was it at the time for a female portraitist to paint the picture of a prospective bride?   What leads the countess to commission Marianne to undertake the assignment?  While Héloïse is lost to a conventional marriage, are we to assume that Marianne remains unmarried?

    Except for the gallery scene and fleeting appearances by a boatman and a groom, men in Portrait of a Lady on Fire are conspicuous by their absence – including the Milanese bridegroom-to-be.  Adèle Haenel, a fine actress, is especially good when Marianne is preparing to paint and Héloïse positions herself for the sitting:  she seems fascinated by what she’s being asked to do and that it depends on her.  Haenel’s sometimes sulky persona gives proceedings a welcome touch of astringency.  Although Noémie Merlant is good, her strong features have a masklike quality.  The relentless beautifying of images gives the faces and bodies of the principals a lustrous perfection that occasionally suggests a twenty-first-century perfume commercial.  (I’m no expert but Valeria Golino’s hairdo also looked rather modern.)  Luàna Bajrami may have been cast because her face brings to mind an art-history serving girl but her features are actually more mobile than Merlant’s.  Armande Boulanger makes a good impression during her few minutes on screen.

    As well as seeing Héloïse again in a portrait frame years later, Marianne also catches sight of her one night at the theatre.  On the stage, a song Marianne once sang to Héloïse is playing.  It brings tears to the eyes of Héloïse, alone in her theatre box.  As Marianne watches, Céline Sciamma’s camera focuses on Adèle Haenel’s face, and stays there for what seems like two or three minutes.  Haenel is absorbing to watch throughout this final shot – and Sciamma, unlike Luca Guadagnino at the end of Call Me by Your Name, doesn’t dilute the effect by making the tearful face on the screen share it with the closing credits.  You’re nevertheless aware that Haenel’s success in holding your attention is a remarkable technical feat.  That makes it an all too fitting conclusion to Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

    8 October 2019

  • Wet Season

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Anthony Chen (2019)

    The rain it raineth almost throughout writer-director Anthony Chen’s second feature, set in Singapore during monsoon season.  A lack of sunny intervals reflects the prevailing mood of the film – and its protagonist Ling (Yeo Yann Yann) – but screen weather serves a purpose beyond pathetic fallacy here.  Successive downpours influence the storyline too.  If it wasn’t pouring down, Ling, a Mandarin language teacher in a boys’ secondary school, wouldn’t need to give lifts in her car to one of the students, sixteen-year-old Wei Lun (Koh Jia Ler).  The climate, for much of the story, isn’t altogether symbolic – the rainfall isn’t enabling new life to grow.  Ling, a Malysian, is continuing to undergo IVF treatment, having failed to conceive throughout her eight-year marriage to Singaporean businessman Andrew (Christopher Lee), which is under increasing strain.  The couple share their home with, and care for, Andrew’s elderly and severely disabled father (Yang Shi Bin), partially paralysed by a stroke.  The only nappies that Ling changes are her father-in-law’s.

    The action man-boy Wei Lun changes Ling’s world of numb, barren stasis.  He’s no Mandarin scholar – he attends remedial classes with Ling outside normal school hours – but he’s a brilliant exponent of wushu, a Chinese martial art.  Not at the start of Wet Season, though, when Wei Lun is on crutches following a training accident – another reason for giving him a lift home to the apartment block where he lives with his parents.  Their absence from the film reflects how little interest they take in their son.  On one occasion, Wei Lun comes back with Ling to her home, and the father-in-law immediately takes a shine to him.  When the boy wins his wushu class at the national school championships, it’s Ling and the old man, not his parents, who are watching, along with Wei Lun’s schoolmates.

    It’s not unusual, when an infirm character in a film suddenly gets a new lease of life, for it to be a short-term lease.  A few screen minutes after encouraging Ling, as best he can, to smile, her father-in-law dies.  Nor is it unexpected when the relationship between teacher and pupil gets more serious and sexual.  The culminating non-surprise of Wet Season is Ling’s discovery that Wei Lun has succeeded where both her husband, who by now is with another woman, and IVF failed.  A plot synopsis of this small-scale drama makes it sound tritely predictable, and the film takes time to gather momentum.  Once it does, though, it’s absorbing – and offers a perspective on male sexual entitlement that, thanks to the two main characters’ relative status and ages, is unusual.

    Wei Lun makes a difference to Ling’s life but not, until the later stages of the film, a dramatic difference.  When they eat durian together, its creamy pulp may predict forbidden fruit to follow; and Ling is aware that she enjoys Wei Lun’s company.  He may also, of course, be the child she’s never had.  You don’t get the impression, though, that she’s analysing these things too closely and there’s no suggestion she might be ready to transgress the bounds of reasonable social interaction with a student.  Wei Lun has a more definite and proactive crush on Ling:  he takes photos of her on his phone when her back is turned in the classroom.  (It seems the other kids must be looking away too – no one else seems to notice what he’s doing at this stage.)  The crucial shift in the relationship occurs one evening when, as she drives him home, he has a nosebleed.  She helps him into his apartment; not only are his parents absent but there’s next to nothing in the fridge when Ling goes to it to make an ice pack.  In his bedroom, the walls covered in posters of his hero Jackie Chan, Wei Lun removes his shirt as Ling applies the ice.  She sits on the bed beside him.  Once his nosebleed has stopped, Wei Lun takes hold of Ling and kisses her.  She struggles but he’s too strong for her.  He takes off the rest of his clothes and forces her to have intercourse.

    This scene and its aftermath are remarkable in several ways.  We see from Ling’s reaction that Wei Lun’s passion isn’t unrequited.  (This serves as a reminder too that her husband no longer wants to have sex with her.)  Even so, there’s no doubt that Wei Lun rapes her.  After he’s done so, he registers her distress and is concerned, but for his own self-esteem rather than for Ling.  He asks her not if he’s done wrong but ‘Did I do it wrong?’  Performance is what matters.  She understandably doesn’t answer his question – not least because she knows, whatever position she now takes, she will be seen by others to have done wrong.  This is well and allusively captured during a subsequent car journey.  Ling’s attempts to behave as if nothing has happened exasperate Wei Lun; he tries to get out of the car while it’s moving.   In preventing that, Ling swerves and collides with a cab.  No one is physically hurt but the angry cabbie berates her for terrible driving – even worse, he says, when your son is in the car with you.

    Later, as they’re about to part for the last time, Wei Lun peremptorily informs Ling this is his first relationship so she might at least have the decency to make its ending memorable.  (This leads to the prolonged embrace which provides the image for the film’s theatrical release poster.)  Anthony Chen doesn’t censure Wei Lun; he suggests, rather, that a confusion of virgin’s anxiety and lack of affection from his own mother may be driving the teenager’s behaviour and attitude.  Even so, he’s not easily likeable and it’s hard to forget that Jiale, the boy protagonist of Chen’s debut feature Ilo Ilo (2013), wasn’t easily likeable either.  Wei Lun never learns about Ling’s pregnancy.  Her marriage ends, she gives up her job and returns to her mother’s home in rural Malaysia to have the baby.   Now the weather has gone full-blown metaphorical.  The rains are over.  In the final scene of the film, Ling looks up into a sky of white clouds, through which the sun is starting to peep.  She smiles, as her father-in-law recommended.

    I stayed for part of the Q&A with Chen that followed the screening of Wet Season at the London Film Festival.  He talked interestingly about the casting.  Yann Yann Yeo and Koh Lia Jer both appeared in Ilo Ilo and Chen didn’t want either of them in the leads this time.  They were mother and son in the earlier film; the idea of their playing characters sexually involved with each other carried, Chen thought, ‘too much incestuous baggage’. Only when he failed, after a lengthy search, to find his Ling and Wei Lun elsewhere, did Chen think again.  Doing so was a good decision.  Yeo Yann Yann, the strongest adult performer in Ilo Ilo, has a larger role in Wet Season and her characterisation is an object lesson in realistically expressive acting.  The viewer can read her feelings but they’re not obvious to other people on the screen, except when Ling means to be transparent to those people.  (This isn’t simply a matter of an inscrutable oriental face:  Awkwafina in The Farewell is, compared with Yeo, unrealistically expressive.)   As Wei Lun, Koh Jia Ler, ten years old when he played Jiale in Ilo Ilo, now convincingly combines physical heft and emotional callowness.  Yang Shi Bin is subtly eloquent as Ling’s father-in-law.

    Chen’s sensitive direction is better than his writing.   There are elements of the screenplay, both minor and major, that seem careless or awkward.   One of Ling’s fellow teachers lives in the same block as Wei Lun’s family; when she bumps into Ling there with the boy, this teacher/nosey neighbour is, from the start, suspicious but it’s not followed through.  Wei Lun’s obsession with Ling comes to light when some of the other boys see him looking at images of her and seize his phone.  This results in a fight and the phone being handed in to the school principal, who summons Wei Lun and Ling to his office.  Chen seems to forget Wei Lun’s recent wushu triumph:  that would not only give him kudos among his peers; it would also mean the principal would know who he was, instead of saying, ‘Now, let’s see – you’re in 4B, aren’t you?’  The principal is a cartoon careerist, about to move on to his next job – he doesn’t want to know any more from Ling about her relationship with Wei Lun, in case it makes inconvenient waves.  Yet if he’s selfishly ambitious, the principal would likely be alert to anything likely to embellish his CV, including his students’ sporting success.

    The sequence of events late on is baffling.   After signing off papers for the divorce her husband has instigated, Ling prepares to move her things out of the apartment they shared.  She happens to find an unused pregnancy testing kit in the bathroom cabinet and, for the hell of it, takes the test.  We hear her reaction – a bitterly astonished moan – but don’t see it.   When she arrives back in Malaysia, she shows no outward signs of pregnancy.  It must be possible to get a divorce very quickly in Singapore …  These considerations seem finally unimportant, though.  What matters most in the film, and makes it distinctive, is the central relationship.  Anthony Chen’s handling of that relationship – in both its touching and its troubling aspects – makes Wet Season memorable.

    9 October 2019

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