Romancefest 2021: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Written and Directed by Celine Sciamma

Starring Noemie Merlant and Adele Haenel

France, 2019

This movie was in theaters right around the time everything shut down for the pandemic, so I never got around to checking out until now. Highly critically acclaimed, this is the story of a young painter in the 18th century who travels to an island in Brittany to paint the portrait of a young woman on the verge of being married off. She refused to pose for the previous painter who visited, and her sister possibly killed herself shortly before that to avoid being married off. So, this young woman isn't coming into the happiest of circumstances in the lonely estate on the windswept island.

I knew the broad strokes of this coming into the movie, and based on the old dark house, the ominous warnings of the backstory and the images I'd seen of women in period costumes, for whatever reason I assumed this was going to be a movie about treachery, secrets and back stabbing. That some horrible secret would be learned and it would destroy everyone's lives, or everyone would be poisonous to each other, stuff like that.

I was happy I was wrong. I specifically liked the middle passage of the movie where, left in the home by themselves, the painter, her subject, and the maid, all sort of form their own little family together, enjoying time in the house together, time on the island together, helping each other with their problems, taking things into their own hands, feeling some sense of freedom.

The painter and her subject eventually admit they're in love with each other and begin a secret relationship, which is doomed due to the timing and circumstances. Still, they have this brief window where they're able to freely express their love for each other, and even before this, they have an unspoken love/lust for each other, as they seduce each other just be stealing glances or probing each other with conversation. Just finding someone to talk to can be so exciting.

Along with all of this, the movie is a beauty to behold, not just thanks to the locations and the actresses but also because of the way the director is able to make painting cinematic. We get tight closeups of the painter's canvas, and get a clear sense of how the layering of colors works, what the brush on the canvas really feels like. The thing you never notice about paintings until you see them in person is the fact that they're three dimensional, that texture is involved. This movie gets that texture across in a way few do, which sets it apart and makes it memorable.