“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” Is More Than a “Manifesto on the Female Gaze”

A still from Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
Without showing men onscreen, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” depicts the myriad ways in which the patriarchy constricts the lives of its female protagonists.Photograph Courtesy Neon

Last year, the British publisher Fitzcarraldo re-issued “L’événement” (“Happening”), a memoir by the French writer Annie Ernaux. Ernaux, who is seventy-nine years old, is not well known outside of France, but in her native country she is considered something of a literary lioness, for her stouthearted willingness to mine material from her own life. She has written books about her extramarital affair, the death of her mother, and a brush with breast cancer. But “L’événement,” in which she tells the story of an illegal abortion she had in 1963, at the age of twenty-three, may be her most aching work. In it, she mourns the lack of great works of art that affirm or even depict her experience. “I do not believe there exists a ‘Workshop of the Backstreet Abortionist’ in any museum in the world,” she writes.

This line made an impression on the French filmmaker Céline Sciamma, who cited it recently as the inspiration for one of the most striking scenes in her new film, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” The movie is a lesbian love story, set on a remote shore in Brittany, in the eighteenth century. After premièring last May, at Cannes, where it won Best Screenplay and the Queer Palm, it was released wide in the United States in February. (It shares a distributor with “Parasite,” and has attracted similar levels of buzz; according to Deadline, its U.S. début was one of the strongest of any French film since “Amelie.”) In the aforementioned scene, three women lounge together on a bed inside a drafty country estate, their faces warmed by a crackling fireplace. One of them, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), is the sheltered but willful daughter of the house, betrothed to a wealthy Italian courtier whom she has no desire to marry. Another, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), is the Parisian artist hired to paint Héloïse’s portrait, who has also become her lover. The third, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), is the house’s young maid, who is recuperating from an abortion that she received, at the home of a local herbalist, earlier that morning. Suddenly, Héloïse has an idea. Does Sophie feel well enough to get out of bed? Héloïse drags the mattress the women had been resting on to the ground, tells Sophie to lie down upon it, then positions herself in the same stance that Sophie’s abortionist had assumed hours before, reënacting the procedure. “We are going to paint,” she tells Marianne, who grabs her oils and a small sliver of spare canvas.

Sciamma—who has directed five films in France since 2008—has called “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” a “manifesto about the female gaze,” and it’s true that at every turn her film subverts the male perspective in favor of feminine ways of looking. There are hardly any men in the movie at all, and, when they do appear, they often have their backs turned or their faces out of focus; when we finally do see a man’s face clearly, it feels like an intrusion. The film makes unusually expressive use of costumes without glamorizing its stars: each protagonist appears in a single, simple dress for the majority of the film. Sciamma builds her story out of glances and stares, of women’s faces illuminated by candlelight or the harsh white sun on the beach, of mirrored surfaces that invite careful looking; the opening shots are closeups of the faces of young girls as they look at Marianne, their instructor in a drawing class some years after the love affair takes place. (The story is told as a flashback.) But “manifesto” seems too didactic a term for “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” ’s finespun romance and delicate, transfixing tableaux, and “female gaze”—a scholarly term worn out from overuse—is inadequate shorthand for its thorough exploration of the entanglements between artistic creation and burgeoning love, between memory and ambition and freedom. The film is about the erotic, electric connection between women when they find their desire for creative experience fulfilled in each other, but it is equally about the powers of art to validate, preserve, and console after a romance is over.

Even without showing men onscreen, Sciamma depicts the myriad ways in which the patriarchy constricts the lives of her female protagonists. Héloïse is set to marry the rich Italian man because her older sister escaped the same fate—by falling, or more likely leaping, off the craggy cliffs near their house. Héloïse had spent time living with Benedictine nuns (“Equality is a pleasant feeling,” she says); now her mother, the Comtesse (Valeria Golino), has brought her back home, and locked her inside to make sure that she doesn’t follow her sister’s lead and ruin the family’s fortunes. A lover of music and literature, Héloïse has never seen an orchestra play. Marianne, who arrives at the house alone, after a rough boat ride and a rocky climb from the shore, has known more freedom in her life: she is set to inherit her father’s portrait studio; she speaks fluent Italian and has spent time outside her native country. But, we learn, she often submits her best pieces to salon exhibitions under her father’s name, in order to have her work shown. She secures the gig to paint Héloïse’s portrait—a gift for the Italian, to seal their betrothal—only after a male painter comes first, and Héloïse refuses to pose for him.

There is, from the outset, a sportive tension to the relationship between the two women. To win Héloïse’s coöperation in the portrait-making, the Comtesse tells Marianne to lie and say that she is at the house to serve as Héloïse’s walking companion. Marianne must work on her portrait at night, then, stealing only a few furtive glances at her source material: Héloïse’s face, when it’s not hidden behind a large hooded cape (a garment left over from the convent); her hands, folded in her lap on the beach. When Marianne confesses her true project, Héloïse demands to see the painting. She studies the likeness, how it smooths out her sharp features and makes them plain, and pronounces it deeply lacking. (Haenel, it should be said, has one of the most compelling faces in the current cinema, her smile lines and a groove between her eyebrows etching traces of emotion into even her passive expressions.) The dialogue between the two women is provocative, pithy, laced with mutual understanding and mutual challenge. “I didn’t know you were an art critic,” Marianne says, wounded by Héloïse’s judgment. “I didn’t know you were a painter,” Héloïse shoots back. Héloïse wants Marianne to know that she is not like the other subjects she has painted; she’s not docile, and certainly not domesticated. When Héloïse agrees to sit for a second portrait, she reminds Marianne that, though she is the subject and Marianne the painter, Marianne is not the only one doing the scrutinizing. She is willing to be appraised, but she also intends to do the appraising.

Where many other directors of a period lesbian romance might emphasize the taboos of same-sex love, Sciamma is less interested in shame or shock as she is in the force of the genuine bonds that form. Her filming of sex and nudity ingeniously sidesteps titillating cinematic conventions: the only intercourse shown involves fingers in an armpit, and the only time we see Héloïse’s full nude form, she is stretched on a bed, a small mirror blocking her pubis as Marianne gazes at her own reflection, sketching a self-portrait. The film’s relative modesty feels, in part, like a rebuke to another acclaimed French lesbian romance, 2013’s “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” whose male director included a six-minute sex scene that the female stars later said they found demeaning to film. (In an offscreen protest against the film-industry patriarchy, Sciamma and Haenel recently walked out of the César Awards, France’s version of the Oscars, when Roman Polanski, a convicted rapist, was announced as a winner.)

Sciamma’s images repel sentimentality even when they seem at risk of it. Sophie’s abortionist lives in a one-room hut with her children; she performs the procedure on the room’s only bed, where her youngest, an infant, also happens to be lying. As the abortionist inserts a poultice into Sophie’s vagina, and Sophie gasps in pain, the baby gently grabs her fingers and swats at her face. The image sounds maudlin on the page, or clumsily political—one new life serving as a doula for the forestalling of another. But in Sciamma’s hands it becomes an inevitable practicality: Where else would a baby be in a crowded home except lying on the bed? Where else would the procedure take place?

“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” is, among other things, a story of profound female solidarity, but it almost never feels like it’s hat-tipping to modern-day gender politics or casting feminist talking points in sepia tone. Instead, Sciamma allows sisterhood to bloom organically out of the setting’s austere traditionalism. When the Comtesse leaves the estate for several days, the three young women settle into a quietly utopian routine. In one scene, Héloïse and Marianne quietly cook and pour wine for Sophie while Sophie sits finishing her needlepoint, taking a pause from her domestic duties without comment or fanfare. (For a love story, the film spends a remarkable amount of time with the trio.) The impact of these moments is all the greater for the deliberateness with which Sciamma films them, their unhurried quotidian rhythms. In another scene, the three women read Ovid’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” aloud, listening raptly as the poet describes Orpheus looking backward on his way out of Hades, thus dooming Eurydice, his lover, to remain in the underworld. Maybe, Héloïse says, Eurydice told Orpheus to turn back to look at her. Marianne’s interpretation is different: “He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s,” she says, in a line that reverberates with the film’s themes. “He chooses the memory of her.”

Sciamma said in an interview that she wanted the romance in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” to feel like, of all things, the scenes between Jack and Rose in “Titanic,” which she considers to be one of cinema’s great “totally queer” love stories. “Leonardo DiCaprio was totally androgynous at the time,” she said. “DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were both not known—not stars—so there was no power dynamic between them. . . . I think it was a huge success because it’s a love story with equality and with emancipation.” Her quote went viral—partially because it sparked a ludicrous debate about exactly when DiCaprio became famous, and partially because Sciamma was being deliberately provocative, not just about a juggernaut of American popular cinema but about the power of her own filmmaking. “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” is more restrained in every way than a film like “Titanic”; there are no “I’ll never let go” proclamations here, no soaring Celine Dion ballads. Just about the only music in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” is a gloriously creepy a-cappella canticle, performed by the attendees of a witchy bonfire gathering in the forest, and a transportive stretch of Vivaldi. The only farewell between lovers is a silent, hurried hug. And yet Sciamma has created a tragic love story as enthralling as any in modern cinema.