Palme d’or favourite that’s hot stuff
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
PG cert, 120 min
★★★★★
Dir Céline Sciamma Starring Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luàna Bajrami, Valeria Golino
There are dozens of portraits going on in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, including oils on canvas, crayon sketches and astonishingly radiant widescreen close-ups from director of photography Claire Mathon, who, with this and Mati Diop’s Atlantique, has scored a doubleimpact coup like no one else at Cannes this year. The two films could hardly look more different. But it’s especially significant that in Portrait – a film about the suppressed but lasting power of the female gaze – writerdirector Céline Sciamma found a collaborator who could sympathetically frame her vision for cinema without, well, being a man.
The story is about a reluctant sitter for an undercover artist. Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), a noblewoman living on the coast in 18th-century Brittany, has refused to be painted by any visiting portraitists before, in part because the fruit of their work is going to be used to marry her off, delivered to snag a future husband like Holbein’s take on Anne of Cleves. She doesn’t want to be married, so she doesn’t want to be painted.
Only the stealthy intervention of Marianne (Noémie Merlant), a talented artist who comes to Héloïse’s mansion
in disguise as a lady’s maid, coaxes her into playing ball. But as their relationship evolves, enabling sneaky and growing intimacy right under the nose of Héloïse’s mother (Valeria Golino), so, too, does the nature and purpose of the commission itself, which comes to seem like more of a goal in its own right, its eventual destination pesky and irrelevant.
Sciamma’s splendid, multi-layered conceit manages to carry equal weight as a love story and a manifesto of sorts for feminine art. Marianne explains that while female nudes are well within her gifts, she has never been allowed to paint the male anatomy. This has seriously impeded her career, hampering her command of the “major subjects” with which other (male) contemporaries have forged their reputations. Perhaps in homage to the corseted traditions of French costume drama, the film is deceptively stately at first. But when the romance catches fire – it’s the only idiom worth using – you may be unprepared for the liberated heat it gives off.
Almost every scene in the second half builds sensationally on the last. Luàna Bajrami plays a vital supporting part as a young, pregnant maid called Sophie who contemplates Vera-drakelike measures, with the compassionate help of both the other women. Both the increasingly indispensable Haenel and the statuesque Merlant thrive as photographic subjects in themselves. The gazing between these women is everything, almost every close-up a gaze reflected back at the viewer. Or in the case of the tear-filled, immaculate last shot, quite potentially a Palme d’or clincher, it’s capturing an oblivious gaze off-screen, accessing a secret history of gazing only these two have ever known.