Portrait of a Lady on Fire review: Simply ravishing from start to finish

David Sexton28 February 2020

The “male gaze” was a term originated by the writer and film-maker Laura Mulvey back in 1975 to characterise the objectifying masculine perspective at work in many movies: in the way they’re shot, the way they’re acted and the way they’re watched.

This clever formulation has since inspired much feminist theory and practice — and indeed the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Céline Sciamma has been talking about deconstructing the male gaze in interviews about this much-garlanded film in a way that makes it sound as though it might be, shall we say, a bit over-determined for immediate enjoyment.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is simply ravishing from start to finish, an absolute treat. Still not for you? It’s for anyone who has a heart.

It is 1770. Marianne (Noémie Merlant) has been commissioned to paint a portrait of a young noblewoman, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), intended for the inspection of a prospective husband in Italy. Only recently out of a convent, not at all wanting to be married off, Héloïse angrily refuses to sit for this picture and has already seen off one male would-be portraitist. So Marianne travels to the remote island off the coast of Brittany, where Héloïse lives with her mother, in the guise of a companion for her, so as to be able to observe her closely enough to paint her portrait surreptitiously.

The first picture Marianne produces is rejected as lifeless by Héloïse when Marianne reveals it to her, but by then the relationship between them has become intense — and Héloïse surprisingly agrees to pose after all… This is such a great plot (concept even) for a film looking at the way women might look at each other, secretly and openly, aggressively or lovingly — and Sciamma, whose previous films have all been contemporary coming of age dramas, has shaped it so beautifully, with such economy of means.

The life of this film lies in the changing looks between Marianne and Héloïse, beginning with Marianne’s precise, intimate, stealthy observation of every detail of Héloïse’s being for the purposes of her painting, met at first by Héloïse’s hard, even insolent stare back at her, ultimately modulating into the unmistakeable look of love growing between them both.

Look of love: Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant star in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

The filming by cinematographer Claire Mathon is passionately attentive in its own right, with no needless movements or unnecessary edits, giving each scene breathing space — and, blessedly, there is no music driving this film. Instead, on the few occasions that music occurs within a scene, it makes its own impact. The movie has its own rhythm that could only be travestied by the kind of score that powers most romances.

The settings are spare and exquisite — the amazing blue sea and rocky coastline of Brittany’s Quiberon peninsula and an authentically faded and formal chateau in the Seine-et-Marne. The costume design by Dorothée Guiraud is eloquent without being overborne by period fuss. And the way the act of painting has been represented (such a calamity in so many films about artists) is decisive and effective. We see the hands of 30-year-old trained artist Hélène Delmaire at work, then cut to Noémie Merlant looking at her model and what she has done, and accept this, in the context of this film all about looking, without hesitation.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire effectively has a cast of just four women — Héloïse and her mother (Valeria Golino) living in this manoir with just one enchanting maid, Sophie (Luana Bajrami), given her own story of unwanted pregnancy that involves an abortion scene — perhaps the one moment when the film seems a little too agenda-driven. Men have been banished, or just omitted. It could have been claustrophobic but the central story is so passionately involving you don’t want to look elsewhere at all.

Haenel has a face that is simply worth looking at this much, with this much rapture. To see her angry stare crease into a smile is amazingly moving. It is impossible to see this film and not realise that its director loves her — and indeed, Sciamma and Haenel, who met when they worked together on Sciamma’s debut film Water Lilies in 2007, had a long affair, now ended although their collaboration continues. This love story, we realise as it ends, is past, as lost as Eurydice is to Orpheus.

It was a classic villain of the male gaze — Hitchcock perhaps or was it Godard? — who so reprehensibly said that film-making is easy, you just find a beautiful woman and point a camera at her. Yet you could say this is what Sciamma herself has lovingly done here herself. Do take a look.

The biggest film releases of 2020 still to come

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