It’s all about image
A handful of pictures drive French movie
A two-hour movie, projected at 24 frames per second, comprises almost 3,000 stills. But according to French director Céline Sciamma, whose new film Portrait of a Lady on Fire has been wowing audiences at festivals around the world, it’s really just a handful of pictures that drive the motion picture.
“You have about five or six images that you really want to make,” she says. “They show you the path ... and they make you brave.”
For Sciamma, one of those was the image of the woman played by Adèle Haenel, her dress licked by a flame at ground level while she gazes at the camera, unconcerned or perhaps unaware. So too was another startling shot, of a woman running headlong toward a seaside cliff top, seemingly bent on self-destruction.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire won the Queer Palme and the best screenplay prize at Cannes, the People’s Choice Award at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and the Film Critics Awards in Norway, and had its North American première this week in Toronto. It tells the story of Héloïse (Haenel), an 18th-century noblewoman in Brittany soon to be married off to a stranger in Milan.
Before the nuptials can happen, the groom wants a portrait of his future wife. But the stubborn Héloïse has already sent one painter packing. So her mother arranges for another, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), to stay with them. She will pose as a companion, secretly observing her subject by day and then committing her to canvas at night.
Sciamma says the notion of the painter-in-disguise — such a powerful hook for a would-be viewer — came to her late in the writing stage.
But that image of a woman ablaze was so vital to the film that the scene around it became the focal point of the movie, aurally as well as visually. Sciamma says she “wanted to invoke all the tools of cinema” to make it.
To that end, she worked with her composer to create a piece of music that could be sung in a round by a group of women who have gathered outside. It’s a powerful moment in the movie; the soundtrack, which has previously been the domain of quiet domestic noises like the crackle of a fire, slowly builds into a joyous, polyphonic, polyrhythmic cacophony.
“I really wanted the film to invent its own language and its own grammar,” says Sciamma of the scene and the song. “It becomes an anthem for the film and ... maybe it will become an anthem for something else.”
Portrait of a Lady on Fire opens in Canada on Dec. 20.