PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE

Terri White on being floored by a delicate film about the power of connection

It was just ten days since the birth of my son, and I was desperate to take him to the pictures. Show him what all of the fuss was about; a fuss he could expect to continue throughout his life. It would be my first and only visit to Baby Cinema (a genius invention) — the country going into lockdown due to the Covid pandemic just a week later. It would be my last visit to the cinema for four months. But what a way to go out — holding his small, warm body next to mine as the screen filled with director Céline Sciamma’s sublime masterpiece. The story told so beautifully by Noemie Merlant and Adele Haenel, one of a painter and her subject. Of love, touch, but also, isolation. Of the language that those who hide their desire have to create to communicate, to live. All told, radically, beautifully, through the female gaze. I know that my boy will spend many years watching cars explode and capes in the breeze, but I wanted his first time in my very favourite of places to be about poetry and the humanity that can be shown on a screen; shown big and bright. As that final scene played out, I cried, wetting his blanket. It was a visceral, vital experience that I clung to in the months that followed, when we didn’t venture further than the green space at the end of the road. When the films we watched were on a much smaller screen. I can’t be certain, but I‘m pretty sure the boy clung to it too.