Portrait of a Lady on Fire: Daring to See

Sciamma and the cinematographer Claire Mathon, who also photographed Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019), convey beautifully the island’s unstable climate. The acuteness of the sunlight outdoors reminds me of the divine brightness in Paul Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon, painted in Brittany, not far from the movie’s setting. Natural light seems to permeate the film from the start, indoors as well as out. The choice to use digital cameras allowed Sciamma and Mathon to capture interior scenes in much lower light than might otherwise have been possible, contributing a great deal to the painterly quality of the images. A cool light seeps into the study where Marianne sets up her canvases when she must paint at night, from her mind’s eye, and into Marianne’s visions of Héloïse emerging from the dark in a white gown. The startling glow of that whiteness—like that of the peasants’ bonnets in Gauguin—is almost blinding. The film weaves a series of oppositional ambiences: wet and dry, fiercely lit and swathed in shadows, warm and cold. On Héloïse’s first walk with Marianne as chaperone, the dunes are buffeted by strong, dry winds. And yet the morning mist offers a welcome shelter from the glare of the sun, and creates images that echo the early one of the wet canvases. That coolness is offset by the warmth of the fireplace in the kitchen where Marianne, Héloïse, and Sophie pass much of their time in close camaraderie, playing cards, cooking together (in a subversion of the expectations of their class), and telling stories. Fire appears as domestic hearth, as premonition of passion (especially in the bonfire scene in the village), and, again, as a homely, comforting blaze, during the abortion that Marianne and Héloïse help Sophie to procure.

Sciamma imbues the abortion scene with uncanny intimacy. Sophie’s holding the tiny hand of the midwife’s baby during the procedure is one of the fiercest feminist gestures I’ve seen in film in recent years. “Look,” Héloïse commands Marianne. Back at the mansion, they pull a mattress to the floor, and by the fire’s glow, Marianne paints Sophie, still flushed from pain, with Héloïse posing as the midwife. Héloïse’s order suggests that art can be an act of solidarity—a meaningful encounter with another. But perhaps it also means that art cannot be truly great without risk, of breaking new aesthetic ground or of touching a raw nerve. Sciamma has said that a line in L’événement, a memoir by the French writer Annie Ernaux about an illegal abortion she had in 1963, was an inspiration for this scene in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. “I do not believe there exists a Workshop of the Backstreet Abortionist in any museum in the world,” Ernaux writes wistfully. Paint what we really see, Héloïse seems to be telling Marianne—a potent challenge.

Although Héloïse steps behind the canvas of her own portrait to judge its attributes, Marianne does not relinquish all her artistic authority. Only one hand wields the brush. Héloïse’s brilliance lies in recognizing her latent power as an inspiration and source, and demanding that her physical, earthy presence, and her despair, not be denied by art but instead allowed to fuel and dictate its form. Marianne’s disquietude about capturing the essence of her subject—does it lie in the sculptural folds of the dress, the slanting of the light, the positioning of the hands, the forceful softness of the earlobe?—communicates representation as not just an aesthetic quest but also a philosophical one. Each time Marianne steadies her gaze, her muse’s piercing blue eyes defiantly peer back at her. “Is this how you see me?” Héloïse asks incredulously, after her first portrait is finished. It is the muse speaking up that sets off the transformation of the relationship between her and the artist into a true meeting of the minds, which can then bloom into passion.

This daring to look, and look back, is represented in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which Marianne, Héloïse, and Sophie read and discuss. Did Eurydice bid Orpheus to turn around for her own sake, rather than just in order to free him? And did his genius owe as much to their tragic parting as it did to his talent? The muse is inextricable from the sense of loss. Marianne, too, has visions of Héloïse at her back. In these apparitions, Héloïse’s gown shimmers with the luscious light of El Greco’s garments, or of the gowns in John Singer Sargent’s portraits of society women. It’s a dazzle that is also ghostly. It hints that perhaps art itself is a kind of haunting—a transmutation of life into something else, an antidote to death. Once Héloïse’s betrothal is sealed and she submits to trying on her wedding gown, Marianne promptly departs; at the last minute, Héloïse bids her to turn, so that her image, as the lost beloved, can be fixed in Marianne’s mind.

The two lovers almost meet again, twice. Attending a painting salon, Marianne—the only woman painter there—comes across that portrait of Héloïse as a married woman and mother. This formal image of maternity is far from the humbler, truer painting of the scene inside the midwife’s hut that they recreated together. Later, Marianne sees Héloïse again, at a concert in Milan, and cannot take her eyes off her. As the camera slowly closes in on Héloïse—crying silently, giving in to desolate spasms, and then beginning to laugh—Sciamma and Mathon forge, in this sublime finale, a bristling vision of womanhood. Héloïse, in her prime, seems to take full stock of her loneliness, but her recollection, like Eurydice’s, is inhabited by the once sweet presence of her lover. She bathes in Vivaldi’s notes, perhaps remembering the risk that she once took. Thanks to this image, I’ll never look the same way at the paintings, by Mary Cassatt and others, of lone women in opera houses and concert halls. I’ll always wonder how many ardent fires burned—how many were extinguished—before the last soaring note of whatever music they were hearing. And yet Portrait of a Lady on Fire offers enduring images not just of longing, or of resilience, but also of creation. Héloïse suffers, but she also exults—she is her own creation and creator. Her vision sets her world ablaze.