In portraiture, representing someone’s likeness is more than an act of looking — it’s an act of learning another person. From the curves of her ear cartilage to the contours of her hands at rest, to paint a subject is to commit her to memory, even down to the smallest mannerisms. As Greta Gerwig asserted in “Lady Bird,” another film with a central female gaze, love is fundamentally an act of paying attention.
No one learns this more profoundly than the characters in “Portrait of a Lady On Fire,” premiering in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, a film in which memory (and portraiture) become powerful vessels of love. Directed by Céline Sciamma, the period romance renders the searing love story between Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), a reluctant bride-to-be recently out of a convent, and Marianne, the young artist commissioned to paint her wedding portrait.
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In Brittany, 1770, when Marianne arrives at the sprawling estate, she does not expect Héloïse’s mother (Valeria Golino) to request that she work in secret, under the pretense of accompanying Hélöise on walks toward the cliffs — the very site where Héloïse’s older sister died, seeking an escape from the stringently prescribed life that she apologetically bequeaths to Héloïse herself. Nor does Marianne expect to fall in love with the subject of the portrait herself, angry yet resigned to the fate that awaits her.
Sciamma, who penned the script, has a magnificent capability for elegant prose that wouldn’t feel out of place in a classic novel, the kind of dialogue that simmers long after it is spoken. A particularly elegant exchange parses the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a way that is sincere without being mawkish, erudite but not pedantic. Orpheus “chooses the memory” of Eurydice; that’s why he turns around to see her at the gates of the afterlife, Marianne explains: “He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s.” In the same way, Marianne is not only the ardent lover, but also the diligent cataloger of remembrances — depicting Hélöise on the canvas means choosing the memory of her lover over the impossibility of a relationship with her. That their time together has an expiration date makes it all the more precious, because it is finite.
But for Orpheus and Marianne, choosing the memory means irreparably sacrificing the present. Love, like the image, becomes warped through reproduction, distorted as if regarded through the heat waves of an open flame. Gender theorist Judith Butler once wrote, “To say ‘I love you’ is, through the strange logic of citationality and transitivity, to be … at risk of disappearing into anonymity or of being exposed in ways that sometimes seem impossible to bear.” Now, in an era in which reproducing an image is as simple as copy and paste, Sciamma examines the reproducible image as a vessel of memory, occasionally appealing to collective memory, as with a scene that reenacts “Des glaneuses,” the naturalist painting by Millet. “You can reproduce that image to infinity,” Hélöise tells Marianne, as the latter sketches her lover’s likeness for safekeeping. “You’ll see her when you think of me.”
The question remains whether memory will be enough to sustain the legacy of the two lovers’ time together. Sciamma decides that Marianne will never need to wonder, closing the film on a particularly shattering extended tracking shot of Hélöise, in which Marianne sees her from afar. The closing shot of the film becomes a painterly tableau. One could imagine it hanging in a gallery: “Portrait of a Lady at the Symphony.” Yet here is the film’s greatest and most feminist strength: It never traps either character in the role of the muse, allowing each woman the agency and interior subjectivity of the (usually male) artist. Though Hélöise sits for a portrait, Marianne does not imprison her on the canvas, the way a male artist might have done — perhaps the very male painter whose unfinished, faceless portrait Marianne burns in the fireplace in the early scenes of the film. (The scene raises another burning question: Is the portrait on fire, or the lady, or both?) Instead, she jettisons the “rules, conventions, and ideas” of the craft, and opts instead, as Hélöise requests, for “life.”
The themes of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” — the expiration of star-crossed love, the impossibility of an ill-fated romance under societally prescribed strictures — aren’t new. Understanding this acutely, Sciamma turns “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” into a palimpsest of a thousand other romances. Like the feeling of new love itself, the film derives freshness from its execution, rather than its conceit. “Do all lovers feel as if they’re inventing something?” Hélöise asks Marianne, her first lover. Yes, perhaps that’s what Sciamma conveys through the film’s entirety. Love is not a series of gestures, nor a written script, but an original work of art, begun for the first time, again and again. [A]