In “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” a feminist politics of love

Can women find freedom in love?

This philosophical question underlies Céline Sciamma’s scintillating new film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

The lesbian French filmmaker known for her cinematic portrayals of girlhood (Water Lilies, Tomboy, Girlhood) dilates the question through the clever plot device of portraiture structured by the female gaze, in what could be considered an inverted domestic tragedy.

Unlike traditional domestic tragedies in which the home functions as a claustrophobic pressure-cooker that condemns its central characters — and especially its women — to a cruel fate, in Portrait the home affords a freedom of movement and expression for the three central characters in 1770 Brittany: the young upper-class woman, Héloïse; the painter commissioned to secretly paint her, Marianne; and Héloïse’s mother’s maid, Sophie. As soon as Héloïse’s mother departs for a five-day trip to Milan, in preparation for Héloïse’s impending nuptials to a Milanese nobleman, the three young women are liberated from the strictures of their differing class ranks. Sciamma poignantly renders this freedom in scenes where the three women are not only shown alongside each other, but are collaborating, such as scene in which they prepare dinner together, each working on a different element, while Marianne pours and hands them cups of red wine.

In fact, in Portrait it is the patriarchal elements outside the home that pose the greatest threat to the women. While men exist only on the periphery of this film, their presence looms and has consequences for all three of the women’s lives. At the beginning of the story, as Marianne is rowed to the shores of Héloïse’s family’s estate by a team of men, the rough seas knock her canvasses — which she needs in order to complete the task of painting Héloïse — into the water. The men watch as the canvasses float away, yet remain impassive. It is Marianne who leaps into the choppy, cold sea in order to save them.

And it is men who, even from the outside and off screen, control the overarching stories of these women’s lives: Marianne’s art career is dictated by her father’s success as an artist as well as the men who run the art world; Sophie is impregnated by a man (the level of consent is not disclosed) and she has to find a way to rid herself of the unwanted pregnancy; and Héloïse’s life has been promised to a Milanese nobleman whom she has never met and whom she does not want to marry, for her family’s future security.

Héloïse’s storyline drives the film’s dramatic tension. Because her sister chose death over marriage, Héloïse assumes her sister’s obligation — provided that the nobleman finds her attractive. With the marriage contract resting on the likability of her portrait, Héloïse refuses to pose for the male painter tasked with painting it. Marianne is then hired under the guise that she will serve as Héloïse’s walking companion, and she is directed by the mother to paint Héloïse in secret.

Marianne begins her project like any other painter who approaches the female subject as an object — as a body in parts. After her first day with Héloïse, she ruminates on Héloïse’s earlobe, hair, and hands, and that evening we see her spread sketches of Héloïse’s body parts across the floor.

When she finishes the portrait, Marianne confesses her work to Héloïse and shows it to her. Yet, Héloïse isn’t upset about the secretive painting — she’s furious at howMarianne has painted her: “Is that how you see me?” Héloïse’s blistering critique conveys her resentment about Marianne failing to see her, to capture her presence and vitality, especially when she senses an attraction growing between them.

In a revealing moment of trust and consent, Héloïse agrees to pose for Marianne before her mother can dismiss her. It is at this moment that the dynamic changes: Instead of a painter and her subject as object, Marianne and Héloïse collaborate on the portrait.

This collaboration is a negation of the male gaze, and Sciamma has called the film “a manifesto about the female gaze.” The female gaze respects the subjectivity of the person being looked at by seeing them as individual, distinct from and irreducible to the person who is looking. In Portrait, Marianne’s perspective shifts away from the traditional painter’s objectifying perspective not simply because there is sexual chemistry between her and Héloïse — this is no Pygmalion story wherein the artist falls in love with his creation. The sexual attraction is not built on domination or ownership; rather, it is grounded in mutuality and understanding. The value they both place on freedom constitutes their love, and freedom exists in their love because in their freedom they still crave the company of each other. Héloïse, having been granted the freedom to go to Mass alone after Marianne petitioned her mother, returns home and says to Marianne, “In solitude, I felt the liberty you spoke of, but I also felt your absence.”

And the subject not only speaks, she looks, too. When Marianne reveals to Héloïse her personal peccadillos (“When you’re embarrassed, you bite your lips. And when you’re annoyed, you don’t blink”), Héloïse responds in kind by telling Marianne everything she does when she is flustered or frustrated (“When you don’t know what to say, you touch your forehead. When you lose control, you raise your eyebrows”). Many of the film’s scenes are, like this one, mirroring moments to reinforce the equality between the two women. This device visually structures scenes of intimacy, such as the scene of their first kiss — where Héloïse and Marianne face each other and each pull down their scarves to kiss — and the scene of them gazing hungrily at each other while on opposites sides of a bonfire. Héloïse imagines this equality in terms of lovers “inventing something” together. Sciamma even intentionally cast “women who were the same height and age,” she told the New York Times, as a visual reinforcement of equality.

Héloïse makes Marianne a better artist by encouraging her gaze — by telling her to look, for example, at Sophie while she is lying on a bed undergoing an abortion, when Marianne’s instinct is to turn away. That night, it is Héloïse who says, “Get your things, we’re going to paint,” and then, after asking Sophie if she is able to participate, reconstructs the scene of the abortion with her and Sophie as subjects while Marianne paints.

The act of looking serves an essential purpose in Portrait, not only overtly in the function of the female gaze but as a type of speech, and even of intimacy, not only between Marianne and Héloïse but between audience and film. The deliberate pace of the film, noticeably enhanced by the lack of soundtrack, demands the audience’s full attention to look, of “feeling seeing,” as Jill Soloway articulated the way the female gaze allows for female embodiment on film.

The power of looking is manifest through the film’s use of the Orpheus myth. Sciamma has spoken about feminist interpretation of the myth — “It’s basically about how the male gaze can kill you” — but in Portrait places the myth under interrogation, particularly in the scene where Héloïse reads the story of Orpheus and Eurydice aloud to Marianne and Sophie. While Sophie is appalled that Orpheus did not follow instructions, resulting in Eurydice’s suffering a second death and foreclosing their reunion, Marianne argues that Orpheus made “the poet’s choice” — choosing the memory of Eurydice instead of Eurydice herself. In a moment that foreshadows Marianne’s and Héloïse’s final moment together, Héloïse jumps in to say that maybe Eurydice told Orpheus to turn around — because both women know that their time is limited, and memory soon will be all they have of each other.

The tragedy lies in this — the constraints of patriarchy are real, yes, but the love between any two people is inherently limited, if not by outside forces than by mortality itself. In their time together, Héloïse and Marianne find freedom in a love based in equality — of respect and consent. After, they find this freedom in the capsules of their shared memories, of the time they made together that they can carry with them into the future. “Don’t regret. Remember,” Marianne tells Héloïse. The storyline of Portrait itself unfolds as a memory, and portraiture, too, is a memory. Marianne not only makes herself a portrait of Héloïse but draws one of herself as well, sketched on page 28 of a book that, at the end of the film, reappears as a glorious vulvic purloined letter to let Marianne know that, yes, Héloïse remembers, even though her life has taken her elsewhere.

Referring to Marianne’s call to remember as the film’s “motto,” Sciamma said her intent with Portrait was “to propose another politic of love where it’s not about possession or domination or eternal love or death or eternity,” she explained to IndieWire. “It’s more about love as a dynamic that can only grow.”