A familiar sinking feeling for an independent writer without a regular income source. You have deadlines for long essays that you’re carefully procrastinating on (note: these are not necessarily things you will get paid for, which makes the point about income irrelevant), you know you must get back to writing those pieces, or at least thinking about them, structuring them in your head etc… but then, at the end of a tiring day you take a break by watching a film, and you realise that you absolutely HAVE to write about this film (which no one will pay you to write about), and that this will take up a lot of time and mental energy.
The latest of those films, and one of the best things I have watched in ages: Céline Sciamma’s stunningly shot and performed Portrait of a Lady on Fire, about a growing closeness between two women, an artist named Marianne and her subject Héloïse, in 18th century France. Loath as I am to make “recommendations”, I would unhesitatingly toss this film at anyone who doesn’t mind languid narratives where nothing very major seems to “happen” for stretches, where the emphasis is on the quiet gesture and the unarticulated emotion.That said, this film didn’t feel slow at all while I was watching it. And it worked at many levels, many of which I haven’t fully processed. It is a beautifully developed romance set in a very particular place at a particular time. It is an examination of idealised vs practical versions of love, and of the misleading idea that it is the artist who is both in control and feels most deeply while the subject is a blank slate. And it makes intriguing use of the Orpheus-Eurydice story as a parable for women’s agency. (What if it were Eurydice who asked Orpheus to turn around and look at her on their way out of Hades, thus sealing her fate but also ensuring that she got to choose her destiny, to win a form of immortality rather than live a mundane, subservient life?)
But as much as anything else, I saw this as a sort of meta-film that contrasts two different forms, painting and cinema, and their treatment of the artist-subject relationship. This is made most obvious in the extraordinary final sequence (no spoiler here, I don’t think anything could spoil the effect of that scene), a nearly three-minute take where the face of the actress Adèle Haenel becomes as much of a muse for director Sciamma’s canvas as the character Héloïse was for Marianne in the story. (By the way, it was only after watching the film that I learnt that Sciamma and Haenel had been in a real-life relationship. No surprise. There is something very urgent and personal about that final sequence.)I'll save a longer piece for later, maybe after a second viewing. This film is on Mubi, and will only be there for another week – so don’t waste time.
P.S. I don’t usually like making direct comparisons between two films, or sweeping proclamations about one being “better” than the other – especially when the films in question are both of high calibre and very different in texture, genre or style. Few exercises are so pointless or reductive. But I’m tempted for once to get into comparison territory, given that a film this good was a potential contender at the Oscars last year. And especially given some of the talk I heard about how Parasite was a masterwork that had, purely on merit, succeeded in doing something that decades of foreign-language films had not.
This is not intended as a putdown of Parasite (and I clarified some of my thoughts about the Oscars in this piece earlier) but as a comment on narratives about why this or that film “deserves” an award. One of the themes of Portrait of a Lady on Fire is how art created by women – or the women’s gaze more generally – has historically been neglected, patronised or treated as less important or less “universal” than male art. The fact that France didn’t choose this film as its official submission to the Oscars was not, I’d like to think, because it was perceived as “just a women’s picture” – as a period love story that didn’t deal with Big Subjects. But history suggests that could be the case. If Parasite broke (or appeared to break) one glass ceiling, others are comfortably intact.
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