Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Cinema in its infancy was an escape for people.  This was especially true for the Depression.  People wanted fantasy and an opportunity to see stories come to life and other lives lived.  It has been about four months since I truly had an experience that truly took me out of daily life and put me in someone else’s shoes.  Portrait of a Lady on Fire is that film for me.  The film stars four people and is incredibly small in terms of scale.  The wonderful actresses are Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luàna Bajrami, and Valeria Golino.

The story follows a young painter named Marianne who is commissioned to paint a woman named Héloïse who is due to be married in a few weeks to someone her sister did not want to be betrothed to.  The difficulty posed in completing the commission is that Héloïse has no desire to be painted for her portrait as she feels that the act of doing so seals her fate to being married to her German suitor.  A cat and mouse game ensues between Héloïse and painter Marianne until the two women and a chambermaid named Sophie spend five days together.  In that time themes about a woman’ place in the world, the importance of social status, and independence are explored.  These moments are explored in such a way whereas an audience member you get a visual representation of just how trapped in their roles these women are.

The most important thing to know about this film is that it is a story about three emotionally imprisoned women who very much have no escape from the issues they face and the conversations they have surrounding their respective situations.  This film never needed a modern story to portray this struggle and that is why I am glad French director Céline Sciamma set this film in the 18^th century.  The director by setting the film inside a colossal manor gave the setting a sense of claustrophobia but also eventually of intimacy and solitude that I am not accustomed to seeing on screen.  This act of location scouting, and production design really helped guide the viewer through the story as it unfolded.

Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel are fantastic as Marianne and Héloïse respectively.  Both women know who they are in their hearts and also are keenly aware of who society expects them to be.  As much as I enjoyed the opening 50 minutes or so of the cat and mouse game involving Héloïse’s stubbornness not to be painted by Marianne it isn’t my favorite aspect of the film.  The romance and subsequent relationship that forms over the second five day span really shows these two women out of hiding from who they are as individuals and truly acknowledging the challenges life presents continuously to them.

The passion between Héloïse and Marianne is subtle but significant.  Yes there are scenes of intimacy between the two women but the substantial conversations they have because they have been affectionate makes the whole relationship hold so much weight even though both women have been together for such a short amount of time.  How both women strive to help the chambermaid with her abortion and how they capture that moment later is the most haunting scene I have seen this year.

The ending of this film brings its characters no hope that things will change and that’s entirely as it should be based on the times they live in.  Audiences who were paying attention will get three scenes that can be considered solid endings for the movie and I like them all but some audiences will feel like the final ending betrays the other two but it gives Marianne and Héloïse the maximum amount of closure they deserve and for a story about women having a lack of independence, it is good to see them have a brief period where they are both set free.  They both get their own forms of freedom of expression and I think that was the goal of painting Héloïse to begin with.  The final portrait represents change and growth but much like art how timeless love can be.