When lead actor Adèle Haenel walked out of this year's César Awards (the French counterpart of the Oscars) to denounce Roman Polański's best director nod (shouting "Bravo la pédophilie" in the lobby after exiting the theatre), it wasn't merely an act of protest against the auteur's past record of sexual assault. It was more of a fulmination against centuries of misogyny and homophobia endemic to the apparently progressive western society. Mlle Haenel herself had been a victim of sexual harassment when she was a young actor and has been a vocal supporter of the #MeToo movement in France. Her collaboration with her former partner Céline Sciamma in "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" is a homage to the thousands of nameless women who have been denied their right to live and love.
It's the 18th century, and painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant) appears on the Britanny coast for her next assignment. The men in the boat seem apathetic to her plight when her materials are swept overboard. She throws herself off in order to salvage her belongings, just like every woman in this film who has to fend for herself in a world reigned over by men. She wrings her skirt dry and climbs to a desolate manor house.
Marianne has been given a week to paint a portrait of the countess's daughter, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). The portrait will be sent to a prospective suitor in Milan, whose decision to agree to the wedding will depend on the quality of Marianne's handiwork. There's a catch though: Marianne has to paint her client without her knowledge. It's implied that Héloïse's elder sister had chosen death over an arranged marriage over which she had no control. To help Marianne out in this delicate situation is the maid Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), while she will pretend to be a companion to the young woman.
Few directors can compose poetry on screen. Even fewer are those who can captivate the audience in a vortex of human emotions and take them along for a ride. Terrence Malick and Christian Petzold are considered doyens of lyrical films for a reason. Now that I have watched Mlle Sciamma in full command over her craft, I can safely add her name to this illustrious yet exclusive list. There's a scene in the film where Héloïse tells Marianne about her time with the Benedictine nuns. "Equality is a pleasant feeling," she says. Marianne has had a superior taste of freedom, thanks to her artist father. She has travelled to Italy and has seen an orchestra play, unlike Héloïse. Yet she has to submit her paintings under her father's name to have any decent chance of getting them exhibited in salons. She might have been offered the job of painting a countess's daughter, but only after Héloïse had refused to pose for a male painter.
Cinematographer Claire Mathon fuses the different elements of aristocracy in a pre-Napoleonic France and turns them into a single monument of forbidden love: furtive glances, white hooded cape and vast swathes of the unforgiving sea, as if in congruence with the Aristotelian maxim, "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts." Héloïse, likewise, is greater than her folded hands and brooding eyes that Marianne tries to sketch on her canvas. To the subject's displeasure with her portrayal, a wounded Marianne says, "I didn't know you were an art critic." Yet she willfully accepts to start from scratch and paint her again, this time Héloïse posing for her. The love between the painter and her subject is sombre, both knowing that their society has no place for a blasphemy as this. Here lies the genius of Mlle Sciamma, who paints this portrayal of passion in an androgynous hue, surpassing the petty boundaries of social constructs like gender. During the 2019 Screenwriters' Lecture Series in London, she said that she wanted to make a film that would embody the "sexiness of consent": a kiss need not be a sudden gesture of erotic love. Mutual consent and respect could arouse the same feelings of passion, even more than two centuries ago. If Barry Jenkins taught me that love has no gender or colour, Sciamma showed that it is above time and space as well.
A reason why Johannes Vermeer ranks so highly among Baroque painters was his love for ordinary subjects, like the milkmaid or the lacemaker (both being the titles of two of his monumental creations). Sciamma replicates the same empathy towards women disregarded by history books in favour of their male better halves. She tells the story of the oft-forgotten maids like Sophie, who has to take care of the house in the absence of the countess while dealing with her own unwanted pregnancy, or the abortionist who operates on Sophie with her children present in the same small shanty. Class barriers break down, even if for a week, when the countess leaves the estate; Héloïse and Marianne cook and pour wine for Sophie. This eye for little details is what brings out the Vermeer in Sciamma.
While discussing Ovid's "Orpheus and Eurydice", Marianne tells Héloïse, "He doesn't make the lover's choice, but the poet's." She refers to the moment when Orpheus looks back at Eurydice, knowing well enough that his action will doom her to stay in the underworld forever. Marianne, similarly, had to make the poet's (or more generally, the artist's) choice while bidding Héloïse farewell. There is no sound and fury, no drama. Perhaps her times had no place for an Orpheus. There is a scene in Pedro Almodóvar's "All About My Mother" (one of the greatest queer films of all time) where Agrado tells Manuela, "I like to say good-bye to the people I love, even if it's only to cry my eyes out". Marianne and Héloïse never speak again. Yet when the painter sees her muse in a portrait holding a book at the edge of the twenty-eighth page, she recalls that it is the same page where Héloïse had asked Marianne to draw herself. Sciamma composes something grander than a period queer love story or a study of the French society in the Age of Enlightenment: the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts.
- Debaditya Sinha (B17)
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