'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' Is A Mesmerizing, Entrancing Lesbian Romance: A Review
CQ Queerness Rating
Recommendation Rating
This review is spoiler-free: enjoy before or after you watch!
Céline Sciamma’s emotional, artistic masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, is a new standard in lesbian cinema. It’s a film that Sciamma calls “a manifesto of the female gaze,” which presents itself in the deeply rapturous romance between two women, Marianne and Héloïse, as they learn to truly see one another. It dares to capture the essence of intimacy that can be exchanged between women through the power of vulnerability, and it confronts the rarity of a love story without the representation of men, who have no dialogue at all in the film. But the pure beauty of Portrait of a Lady on Fire lies within the film’s ability to connect with its female viewers off-screen. As Marianne watches Héloïse, curious and searching, Héloïse says, “If you’re looking at me, who do I look at?” Artist and subject look upon one another with the thrill of discovery, free from the imbalance of power so often portrayed in this dynamic. And as viewers taking in the masterful Portrait of a Lady on Fire, we too can imagine the artist Sciamma behind the camera, turning to us, the subject, and giving us a new lens through which to examine intimacy, art, memory, and love.
Adele Haenel, Céline Sciamma and Noémie Merlant
Throughout the film’s release, Director Céline Sciamma, Noémie Merlant (Marianne) and Adèle Haenel (Héloïse) have connected deeply to women across the world, inspiring fans everywhere to self-identify as members of the “Portrait Nation.” Such adulation is well deserved. Sciamma, Merlant, and Haenel have been making powerful headlines for speaking out against patriarchy, advocating for women’s stories, and raising awareness of the #MeToo Movement. Whether by calling out how women viewers are constantly and inequitably exposed to men’s stories through “avenger shit” or by declaring their love for Virginia Woolf (okay, that one connected to me personally), the Portrait cast and creators are bringing their female audience to the forefront.
Céline Sciamma especially became my hero when she confronted the fear around calling Portrait of a Lady on Fire a “lesbian” film. The director stated that although she would refer to the film as a “lesbian romance” in press interviews, writers would often change the description to “queer romance” to make the movie seem more palatable to a wider audience. Sciamma urges us to remember that the power behind the word “lesbian” is nothing to be afraid of, and its power is what makes the romance behind Portrait of a Lady on Fire so deeply compelling. In another act of courage by the Portrait of a Lady on Fire cast, Adele Haenel recently protested child rapist Roman Polanski’s “Best Director” win at The Cesar Awards, walking out of the ceremony shouting “bravo pedophilia” and followed by Celine Sciamma, who left the award show alongside her. These are women who are unafraid to use their voices, to speak out in the face of injustice, and to celebrate their womanhood in radical ways. Their genius undeniably shows in their ability to channel these emotions and create a passionate, nuanced film that speaks directly to the heart, mind, and body of the female viewer. As Celine Sciamma says, “It’s about reclaiming the female narrative.”
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Neon Images)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire centers around two women in late 18th century and takes place in Brittany, a picturesque peninsula with windswept cliffs and seaside landscapes on the coast of France. Marianne, a free-spirited traveling painter, and Héloïse, an aristocratic woman who has just left a Benedictine convent and has since been effectively imprisoned by her mother. Héloïse has been arranged for marriage to a prospective Milanese husband, as was common among high-born women of the time, but the match hinges upon whether or not the man likes a portrait of Héloïse. Reluctant to marry and desperate for her freedom, Héloïse refuses to sit for the occasion, and after a failed attempt to capture her essence on canvas, Marianne is commissioned to paint the portrait of Héloïse in secret.
Posing as Héloïse’s walking companion, Marianne embarks on her pursuit by stealing secret glances at Héloïse, capturing her aesthetic details, committing them to memory, and later recreating them on canvas. The crux of the film begins when Héloïse, the subject, begins to turn back to look at Marianne. The cool mood of the film, characterized by seaside landscapes and the emptiness of the mansion, shifts into a warm, fiery tension as Marianne and Héloïse begin to ardently explore one another. What follows is a delightfully and respectively voyeuristic love story where sensuality truly means seeing one another.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Pyramide Films)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire resists showing us the face of Héloïse for the beginning of the film. And as Marianne is called to gaze into Héloïse, to look deeply and take in every beautiful detail, we as viewers are similarly compelled to look deeper too, to search this woman with curiosity and a burning desire to know. With Héloïse as the subject of Marianne’s painting and and the audience’s focus, we can postulate that director Céline Sciamma had a deeply emotional and personal connection to this character—and to the woman behind the character as well.
Though the relationship between Marianne and Héloïse in Portrait of a Lady on Fire is fictional, beautifully interwoven into the heart of the film is the thread of a true love story between Director Céline Sciamma and Adèle Haenel. The two creatives met while collaborating on Sciamma’s film Water Lillies in 2007, but news of their relationship only reached the public in 2014 when Haenel won a César award for her role in Katell Quillévéré’s film Suzanne. At the end of Haenel’s supporting actress speech, she declared her love for Sciamma by saying, “And above all, I wanted to thank Céline because I love her, voilà.” How cute, and how french!
Though the two reportedly amicably split just before the film’s release in 2018, their relationship adds new dimension to the romance between Marianne and Héloïse on screen.
“We have not been a couple for a few years, but we have been together for years, and I have written Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu with Adele in mind. Just as the characters in the film discover each other in a painting studio, so Adèle and I met on a film set. We talked a lot about cinema and we grew enormously intellectually. I also wanted to show that in the film: the lasting, emancipating effect that such a romantic encounter can have on your life. ”
Director Céline Sciamma and Adèle Haenel (Andreas Rentz Getty Images)
While the intensifying romance between Marianne and Héloïse is the forefront of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the ingenuity of the film also comes from Sciamma’s ability to connect to the viewer to the story through mood, texture, and sound. Portrait does not rely on a musical score to prompt its viewers with what to feel from one scene to the next, and it doesn’t need to. When we hear each one of Marianne’s brushstrokes across the threads of her rough canvas, we feel the euphoria of creativity’s deeply personal process at work. With each crackle of the drawing room’s fire, the coolness of the mansion emboldens with warmth and possibility. The waves crashing into the shore as the lovers turn inward to one another heightens the passionate tension between them. Sound, and its absence, inform the viewer like a new language, transcending the story from a film the viewer watches to a film the viewer feels.
Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel (Curzon Artificial Eye)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire builds its emotional reservoir in the chemistry between Marianne and Héloïse, achieved by the outstanding performances of Noémie Merlant (Marianne) and Adèle Haenel (Héloïse). While many films rely on performance and recycle cliches about love to pull on the viewer’s emotion, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is unafraid to tell an emotionally layered story: a deeply moving romance with underlying themes of self-discovery through creativity and the bonding power of womanhood.
While I thoroughly enjoyed every brilliantly written moment of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the film’s ending was sheer, exquisite agony. As the credits rolled, the raw emotion of the film consumed the theater and brought us all to silence as powerful art so often does. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is truly a once-in-a-generation kind of film, a new standard for lesbian romance, and is all the better for the incredible women who brought its exceptional story to creation.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire was the winner of Best Screenplay at Cannes Film Festival in as well as European Film Festival in 2019, and has been recognized for its stunning cinematography by both the César Awards and The National Society of Films Critics Awards in 2020.
