Watch This While You’re Stuck at Home
“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” is now on Hulu.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection
In the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, after Eurydice has been sent to the underworld, the tragic lovers earn a chance to reunite on one condition: As Orpheus ascends out of Hades with his love following behind, he mustn’t look back. Easy enough. But just before they can climb out, Orpheus turns. Eurydice is thrust back under, and the pair is doomed to part forever.
The tale brings to life a familiar dream logic—a fundamental understanding that love, at its truest, is inextricable from apprehension and fiery restlessness. But Orpheus’s choice is also an enigma: Did he turn because he was lacking in patience? Fulfilling his destiny? Just a fidgety guy?
Orpheus and Eurydice’s story is read by candlelight in a scene in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a gleaming and baroquely romantic film set in late 18th century France. Midway through the film, the three central characters—portrait painter Marianne (Noémi Merlant), wealthy countess’ daughter Héloïse (Adèle Hanel), and house servant Sophie (Luàna Bajrami)—drink red wine at a table, arguing over Orpheus’s offense. Sophie, the most innocent of the trio, goes for the straightforward take: that Orpheus was a fool. But the older, more unruly Héloïse offers a different interpretation. Orpheus knew fully well what he was doing, she insists. A second chance at mortal love with Eurydice might have failed. Orpheus’s turnaround was a doleful farewell, a way of preserving his memory of her perfection rather than risking its ruin.
Ill-fated love is likewise at the heart of Portrait of a Lady, which ranks among the best films to premiere recently at the 2019 New York Film Festival. It is a subdued and handsome love story, an unhurried study of forbidden female desire and the forces bridling it. Marianne, a young painter, is called on to paint the portrait of a woman named Héloïse, who resides in an exquisitely spartan chateau perched on an exquisitely bleak rocky coastline. The catch is that Héloïse, whose portrait will be sent to an eligible Milanese bachelor to prove her beauty, refuses to sit for a picture. Marianne’s task is to closely observe Héloïse during walks on the coast and then paint her from memory.
Aligning us with Marianne means that the audience, too, becomes Héloïse’s observer. From the start, we are invited to examine Héloïse from afar: her bouncing curls, her stormy light eyes. She is cold and defiant, providing a perfect foil for Marianne, who betrays a certain hunger; the night she arrives at the manor, Marianne’s first order of business is to dig through the cupboards before ripping into a baguette and cheese wedge. Once she meets Héloïse, Marianne’s gaze at her muse is likewise hungry—but, like Sciamma’s own, it is a distinctively female hunger. Despite Héloïse’s beauty, we’re never invited to leer or lust after her. It comes as no surprise when the pair falls in love. But even once they succumb to their desire—when the corsets come undone and their hair is allowed to cascade down their bare backs—the film’s mood is tender sensuality rather than soft-core raunch.
We’re meant to take the intensity of Marianne and Héloïse’s connection—the freedom they find with one another—as a clue into the rigorous constraints of their outside world. In a frank, grounded sequence, the women are forced to deal with an unwanted pregnancy, allowing Sciamma to depict the difficulties of 18th century abortion while cutting against the horror and melodrama that, in a less shrewd movie, would inevitably distort the event. Still, this isn’t a modern imagining of the olde worlde like, say, the upcoming Dickinson. Rather, Sciamma recreates the women’s contemporary world with a candidness and clarity.
Which is to say, there’s nothing stodgy about this story. The film is, overall, a quiet affair, with energetic scenes seaside and languid ones indoors, often illuminated by candlelight. But it is also tight and measured, each shot clean and crisp enough to let you taste the cool ocean breeze or feel the warmth of the manor’s open fire oven. Dialogue is sparse, which makes every line shimmer with allure. “Do all lovers feel as though they’re inventing something?” Héloïse asks Marianne at one point. The film itself feels like an invention, a vivid and triumphantly feminine entry into the annals of tragic stories about lovers and muses, gazers and gazed-ats.
