171. Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Song - More Than A Feeling (Boston)

Movie: Portrait of a Lady on Fire - Portrait de la jeune fille an feu (Céline Sciamma, 2019)

I grew up on films like Speed and Daylight, in which a man with special skills ends up in a fraught situation together with a group of terrified people and one especially resourceful woman, who takes the lead in getting the job done together with our hero. By the middle of the film it's already clear that our two heroes are falling in love, but they can't act on it. No matter how much they pine for each other, first they need to finish the job. The people need to be saved from the tunnel, the bus needs to be stopped. But once the task at hand is completed, the sparks fly and we swoon, more even than in an ordinary romantic comedy. It's not just that Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock get each other after finishing a daunting work, it's that they fall in love through working together, without love necessarily being their intent. They just see each other at their best and nature does the rest. Speed is still the best action movie ever made as far as I am concerned. But its place as the best workplace romance is taken by Portrait of A Lady on Fire. The painting needs to get painted, but afterwards....

I am not trying to be glib here and pretend that I can only enjoy a lesbian romance by comparing it to a kick-ass action movie. Both movies genuinely do have many of the same pleasures, and in fact that is one of the great strengths of Portrait of A Lady on Fire. The job, for a long while, takes precedent over the romance. And even after Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Heloise (Adele Haenel) start their love affair, Sciamma keeps showing them performing domestic/professional (the distinction between the two is often blurred) tasks in great detail without adding an explicitly romantic/erotic component to them. In doing so she briefly lets them (and us) experience the domesticity of a married life they'll never have. In the process the film also normalizes love as something that simply flows out of regular daily activities. Love, no matter how passionate, is here not presented as something that encapsulates and defines the entirety of our lives. Rather, it's something that exists next to work and the ordinary responsibilities of daily life, something you have to make time for. That makes it more special, not less.

This approach works so well, in part because Noémie Merlant gives one of the great performances of the past few years. She comes to the coast to paint and presents herself as an exacting, pragmatic painter for whom that is a job. She is not a genius artist, but she cares and is serious about her craft and her professional obligation to get the job done. She knows that as a woman in her profession she is disadvantaged, but she views that as a fact of life, and herself as a worldly woman who is able to navigate around those bumps and who has made herself a decent life. She doesn't feel the need to complain much and seems reasonably satisfied with everything. This approach to the character is what makes the film. It's easy to imagine how tempting it must have been to make Marianne/Heloise explicitly feminist, or to frame their love affair as an explicit revolt against the patriarchy, but Sciamma never forgets that her characters live in the 18th century and respects the audience to get the political connotations without underlining them. There is no need to make grand statements, Marianne and Heloise don't even see each other as lesbians, the word is not mentioned, the taboo is not mentioned. Their love for each other is special, that it happened is not. 

I have seen this film twice now and liked it both times very much, especially because it is so surprisingly different from Sciamma's previous film Girlhood. That was set in the French banlieus and after a promising first half descended into boring social realism so desperate to make some sort of grand statement that it ended up perpetuating cliche stereotypes (in both form and content) about the people it depicted. Here she completely abandons her realism for classicism and the lush, grand and colorful compositions nicely contrast with the understated performance of Merlant, while also inviting you to look at the world (and Heloise) the way Marianne does.