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
