![]() ![]() The film is a love story between two women, but also between an artist and her subject/muse, and between the dreamer and the dreamed-of. It's a relic out of time, creating a lush, erotic world out of glances and small movements yet it's also very much of our time. Once you know it, you want it.Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the new costume drama from French writer-director Céline Sciamma, is the kind of richly intoxicating movie that compels you to talk like this. Like, ‘Why do I not get this more often?’ Now, we get it more and more, because there’s new writing for women, but it’s an addictive feeling. It’s thinking about my pleasure, about my sisters, about the history of cinema and women’s representation. “It’s about feeling seen as a viewer,” she says. Sciamma says that Wonder Woman, the 2017 superhero blockbuster directed by Patty Jenkins, changed her life. It’s not just arthouse cinema that can do this. You’ve been looking only at women and suddenly it feels different, weird.” She laughs. “He said, ‘I looked at my hand, because that’s the hand of a man.’ That’s what I wanted to do – there’s no man in the film, not as some kind of punishment, but as a way for them to go through someone else’s journey. When – two hours in – a man’s hand appeared in the frame, the engineer looked down at his own. She recalls recording the DVD commentary for Portrait with a male recording engineer, who watched the film alongside her. When they finally act on it, the consummation is as fiery as it is respectful. As the film progresses – at its own, teasing pace – their interactions become so heavy with desire that it’s almost unbearable. But gradually, that stiffness gives way to intrigue, then attraction. They’re awkward at first, Héloïse stiff with suspicion, Marianne struggling to keep up the ruse. The bride-to-be refused to sit for the other (male) painters, so Marianne must attempt to do the portrait under the guise of being her chaperone, snatching glances as they walk along the clifftops. Noémie Merlant is Marianne, a young artist hired to paint Héloïse for said nobleman ahead of the wedding. Mysterious and obstinate, she is soon to be married off to a Milanese nobleman, a prospect she dreads. ![]() Set in 18th-century Brittany, the film stars Adèle Haenel – who worked with Sciamma on Water Lilies, and with whom the director was in a relationship for a number of years – as Héloïse. Her coming-of-age debut Water Lilies (2007) – filmed in the middle-class suburb just north of Paris in which she grew up, and written when she was still at film school – focused on a teenage girl’s infatuation with her synchronised swimming teammate. For over a decade, the 41-year-old’s films have explored the kinds of identities and desires that those public libraries were missing. It’s like, ‘A, B, C, D…’” Is that how she learnt? “Yeah,” she says, with a laugh. Imagine being 14 years old and going to the public library looking for lesbian romance, and just not knowing where to start. “I mean, it did exist, but we were our own island, and we had to learn everything by ourselves. “Without the internet, lesbianism didn’t exist,” explains the French director, who came of age in the Nineties. She just didn’t know what to do about it. ![]()
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