Portrait of a Lady on Fire
“Do all lovers feel like they’re inventing something?” the betrothed Heloise whispers to Marianne, the young woman hired by her mother to paint her portrait as a promise of her marriage to a Milanese nobleman in Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
Marianne (Noemie Merlant) drinks in details of her soon-to-be-lover Heloise (who rejects her marriage and refuses to pose) in order to reconstruct the betrothed’s visage on the canvas.
And lo and behold, before long, Heloise (out actress Adèle Haenel) returns the gaze, even if she takes her time doing so.
The out director Céline Sciamma’s (Water Lilies, Tomboy, Girlhood) demonstrates the “eroticism of consent,” in which she defines the language of the long-debated female gaze while re-mystifying the dizzying experience of falling in love.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a work of cinematic art as fine as the art, poetry, and orchestral music to which the film pays homage, will be revered, adored, and deconstructed for decades to come.
But the film’s theoretical acumen aside, it is deeply engaging, and romantic, even if you have never heard f Laura Mulvey, the female gaze–or feminism for that matter.
