Portrait de la jeune fille en feu
***½/****
starring Luàna Bajrami, Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Valeria Golino
written and directed by Céline Sciamma
by Angelo Muredda "If you look at me, who do I look at?" young noblewoman and bride-to-be Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) asks of Marianne (Noémie Merlant), the artist tasked with painting her marriage portrait, midway through Céline Sciamma's beautifully conceived if somewhat airless Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a historical romance that would easily replace Call Me by Your Name as the swoon-inducing queer love story du jour (with a comparably stunning ending) for youths to share memes from on Tumblr, if Tumblr weren't moribund. That moment of a living art object impishly talking back to the woman who is ostensibly capturing her for posterity works as both quippy wordplay and thematic key. Like much of the Cannes-awarded screenplay, one of the Alejandro González Iñárritu-chaired jury's numerous astute picks, that exchange is doing double-work in a film that's earnestly invested in raising the question of what kinds of lives are representable, and in exploring the tenuous line between lovers from different stations as well as portrait artists and their objects of study.
Set in late eighteenth-century France and pitched in the vein of literary romances about class-crossing lovers struggling to interpret each other's cues (Jane Eyre, say, or Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded), Portrait of a Lady on Fire is as smart as it as emotionally trenchant. Sciamma's precise compositions and evocative editing aren't just formal flexes but integral steps in developing her characters' bond from diametric opposites to furtive collaborators and finally partners. She's just as keen in casting a sharp, retrospective gaze on everything from eighteenth-century remedies for period cramps and unwanted pregnancies to the rules governing the interactions between ruling-class patrons and the arts workers and domestic helpers they employ. The film's framing device, wherein Marianne thinks back to her lost love while leading a class on portraiture, is admittedly a bit more prosaic than it is poetic, and the depiction of the women's romantic fulfilment once they've begun to decode what exactly they see when they look at each other feels, also like Call Me by Your Name, conspicuously polite, save for one evocative, tactile shot involving an armpit. Still, this is a powerful and, despite all the formal rigour, vivacious film about the work of aesthetic commemoration and the way it can serve as both an act of violence, turning women into chattel, and an act of love. Programme: Special Presentations
