Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Love is not only about inevitable loss; it is about the memories it keeps alive. “Don’t regret. Remember.”
Love is not only about inevitable loss; it is about the memories it keeps alive. “Don’t regret. Remember.”
There are enough reviews by professionals that any attempt of mine would be superfluous, even if it is a synopsis of the plot. Refer to IMDb for full technical details. This piece is focused on the very personal, profound impact that art can have on a human being. Before reading this, read this review. As a synopsis of this piece, however, I proffer the paragraph below:
One of the most sublime love stories to be portrayed in the history of cinema — bold, breathtaking, unapologetic — and most importantly, equal. Marianne gazes at Héloïse, who has nothing and nowhere to gaze but back at her — and so their tender, erotic dance of gazes commence, culminating in an eternal flame.
Héloïse and Marianne at the harpsichord
25 out of 47 reviews on Metacritic give a full 100. Critics and audiences alike have been swept away by the intensity of what is radically, unapologetically a lesbian, feminist film almost devoid of men, their gaze, and their perspective. This indicates that the appeal of this story is deeply human, one that speaks to the yearning and burning of emotional desire that transcends labels, strictures and other societal conventions.
Meditative moments are hard to come by in this age of hyper-connectivity and limited attention spans. Meditative arcs that last for 18 days (and counting) are even more astounding and confounding. It is also quiet. The passion is incendiary, yes, and rages long after the final scene cuts, but it is quiet in its unsentimental portrayal of late 18th-century realities of being female, of any station. Interestingly, three are portrayed — the upper, the proliferating middle, and the servant — and brought together in solidarity.¹
I cannot remember the last time I was so moved by a film, in fact, most are forgettable by the time the credits roll, and there is little desire or inclination to rewatch or analyse. Such is the nature of filmmaking these days — audiences demand cheap junk food to titillate what few brain cells are left, instead of three-course meals that nourish the brain and soul.
As the consummate French auteur², however, Sciamma is defiantly laborious — but never tedious — in her storytelling, forcing you (at first unwillingly, perhaps, then you realise you can’t get enough) to take in the details of every scene. There are a multitude of details to be noted, savoured, and recalled.³ Such is the power of the female, and particularly queer, gaze. Bound by socialisation, convention and persecution, to this day, many queer women find gaze to be their most powerful tool in communicating their desires. You couldn’t possibly be caught out if your gaze is lingering yet discreet, non?
And yet, despite the focus of the gaze, you feel this film as well as see it, like a frisson that runs through your body at a particularly glorious progression of chords.
For a love story to come alive in any context, the chemistry between the leads must exist, in real life and on screen. There is nothing more excruciating than watching two people and wondering how the casting director (or the fates?) could fail so spectacularly at their one job. Haenel and Merlant play their roles to perfection, perhaps because they never found the opportunity to rehearse before shooting. In that sense, the chemistry required to portray star-crossed lovers developed in real time over 38 days. How could it not? You are discovering, every take of every scene, something about the other, and paying close attention, the sincerest form of devotion. Is this what sets them on fire, slowly? Who could say.
The healing power of art is a motif that keeps this film running in head and heart long after the final chords of Vivaldi’s RV. 315 ‘Summer’ Movement 3 fade. Whether it is the art itself, or the process of discovering, digesting or co-creating it, nowhere is the aesthetic expression of human endeavour so gloriously presented than in this film. A transactional form of art is the very reason Marianne travels to craggy, windswept Brittany, and through its collaborative transformation it is the mechanism for capturing memories which both women will cherish forever.
It is inevitable that Marianne and Héloïse fall in love, as the entire story sets them up to do so, but it is not inevitable that they remain together. In fact, it is impossible. That is the very premise of the film, yet that is not the thing that eventually breaks your heart. It is the holding up of the mirror to your own experiences and the invitation to examine, if you dare, how love has lingered in all its myriad forms in the recesses of your heart.
For those who have yet to fall in love or experience something quite so enrapturing, but wish to, it could be read as an instructive yet cautionary exposition of what might await — are you prepared for that incendiary interlude in this mortal life to be retained as memories, at the end of it?
The greatest fear of any lover, perhaps, is not that love fades, or morphs into something less perfect with the ravages of time, but that the intense memories on one side is not reflected in the other.
Marianne gives Héloïse the greatest gift she could — letting her go so that she can enter a life befitting her station, knowing that any sort of rebellion would bring both told and untold consequences, neither of which could be easily survived by two lone women in those days. Héloïse returns her own gift of eternal memory, coded, in full sight of society, if they but knew. The lovers and their love exist, suspended in amber, for those glorious five days when time was lengthened. Those five days would no doubt sustain them through a lifetime of navigating the strictures of 18th-century womanhood.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire gives Marianne and Héloïse the most tender, realistic and heart-wrenching resolution any star-crossed lovers could have — not death, because Héloïse is not her sister, but the memory of a love found, grasped, and eternally cherished and remembered. And it might even span the ages — could Héloïse ever confide in her child (doubtful, aristocrats were not and are still not renowned for close relationships with their offspring) about love, and in so doing, transmit the legacy of such sacred memories through the generations? Page 28 and Vivaldi’s RV. 315 ‘Summer’ Movement 3 will forever be the secret code between those two, and for us, the latter will go down in cinematic history as one of the finest coup de théâtre.
And for me? Viewed on Valentine’s Day 2020, with a childhood friend, in an open Singaporean milieu I never thought possible when growing up, it felt as if my own comprehension of love was coming full circle — love I had once found, lost, forever remembered — but never regretted.
Catharsis.
¹ Interestingly, the film’s dialogue is almost entirely formal, even after Marianne and Héloïse become intimate, with the notable exception of the final words Héloïse ever says to Marianne — retourne-toi, not retournez-vous. Perhaps my French friends could comment on the significance of that. Update: in the French language, when you pray to God, tu is used to address Him, not vous. Could Héloïse, cast as Eurydice, be calling out to her Orpheus (a god) in tender address, closing the distance in this final distance?
² She is so very French. Only the French could effortlessly weave in the Ovid retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth as a central plot device without seeming pretentious or superfluous.
³ I’d be very keen to know if you notice the aesthetic parallels in the second to last scene of the film, in which Marianne stands beside her painted depiction of Orpheus’s final look at his beloved Eurydice before he loses her forever.