PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE

(dir. Celine Sciamma, M)

The best film I’ve seen at the festival this year is this genuinely masterful work by French film-maker Celine Sciamma, building on her previous successes in Girlhood and Water Lilies, with this stately, seductive film detailing the romance that blossoms between a young 18th-century bride-to-be and the woman hired to paint her portrait for her prospective husband. Sciamma’s sense of control and almost supernatural ability to evoke oceans of feeling in the slightest of glances draws the audience into the aching sense of longing until it becomes almost too much to bear. The final 20 minutes of this film are nothing short of brilliant — cathartic, heart-rending, poetic, a masterpiece.