Celine Sciamma, the director of last year’s most emotionally overwhelming movie, Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), has said that she borrowed, to some extent, the structure of James Cameron’s Titanic. She wanted the movie’s two lovers, Marianne and Heloise (the poised and exquisitely cast Noemie Merlant and Adele Haenel) to be like Jack and Rose, Leo and Kate.
It’s a fascinating bit of inspiration. For a French artist such as Sciamma, Titanic must seem emblematic of Hollywood grandiosity. How easily we forget (and how quick we are to make memes), though, that Cameron’s Gulliver of a film is, in fact, a decent love story, cheesy dialogue aside. When Gloria Stewart sack-of-shit tosses that MacGuffin into sea, it’s a wistful feeling we’re left with, one, notably, not found elsewhere in Cameron’s work, and one that is, to use the lazy cinephile parlance, “earned.” Love, loss, chagrin, time — it’s all in that Celine Dion’s song.
That wistful feeling, that swelling in the chest, happens no fewer than five times in the last fifteen minutes of Sciamma’s latest and best movie. Heretofore, Sciamma has made more down-to-Earth, so-called coming-of-age stories focused on the uneasy alchemy of gender, sexuality, and growing up. Movies like Girlhood and Water Lilies are very fine works. But with Portrait, which is spellbinding in ways few films these days even aspire to be, one has the sense of an artist having fully cleared her throat.
The Titanic notion of a deliberate, if unnecessary, framing device escorts us into the story of Marianne, a painter in 18th century France who is teaching an art class to girls. (Recall Kate to Leo, “Draw me like one of your French girls.”) As if picking things right up from Sciamma’s prior films, the young artists’ cherubic faces and youthful fingers are among the first images we see. Marianne is posing at the front of the class, urging her students to mind their technique — “First my contours, the silhouette,” “Take time to look at me.”
When Marianne winces at an old painting of hers a clueless student pulled out of storage, we’re sent into Marianne’s memories of “A long time ago” when she painted the titular work. (The actual “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” to which the title refers is seen only once, here, and would have stood out as unusual for an 18th century French painting, a surrealistic anachronism that somehow feels plausible.)
The first hour of Portrait is the kind of slow, getting-to-know-you cinema that feels more urgent than a series of car chases and murders in the first reel. The plot is so simple you wonder why no one else thought of it. Marianne, the daughter of a successful portraitist who will one day take over his business, is summoned to an island estate off the coast of Brittany to paint a portrait. She has been told very little but seems to sense intrigue. Upon arrival, she questions the maid (Luana Bajrami). There were, in fact, two daughters. The first killed herself rather than be married off to a Milanese nobleman she’s never met. That leaves Heloise. And she’s just been pulled out of a convent by her mother (Valeria Golino) to marry the nobleman.
The dialogue is spare. It often lacks subtext. (In the sense that characters pretty much say what they mean and mean what they say.) And they have every reason to be, given their circumstance. Apart from clusters of unnamed men at the beginning and end of the film, there are but four characters, all women, and their world is one of stark realities and clear options and non-options. After a meeting with the mother of Heloise, Marianne ascertains that Heloise, like her late sister, refuses the marriage to the nobleman. If the nobleman likes Marianne’s work, he will agree to marry Heloise. Marianne must paint Heloise without Heloise knowing (Heloise is told Marianne is a walking partner, and buys it because women painters were so rare as to place Marianne beyond all suspicion.) Heloise wore the last painter out, we learn, when she refused to pose or expose her face.
Marianne gets the job because her painter father had painted the marriage portrait of Heloise’s mother, which hangs in the sitting room that hosts Marianne and the mother’s conversations. Although it isn’t in dialogue, the missing furnishings and lack of, well, stuff in the home suggests a wrecked family life (it also suggests a ghost story). We’re not told that Heloise’s father is dead, and that her mother has arranged this marriage so that the family can continue to live as more or less aristocrats — it just hangs in the air as an unspoken truth. Portrait, is, in fact, suffused with male energy — male dominance, even — as these women’s lives are literally governed by the absences and inroads left for them by their patriarchs.
There’s an unassuming quality to Sciamma’s direction, even moments of deliberate formalism feel effortless, like the trailer-made scene of the two leads in profile, their faces overlapping and taking turns looking at one another. Additionally, the ease with which Sciamma executes the traditional setup-and-payoff of her story is impressive. From the start, we’re constantly learning information that will be relevant later, and these are often simply layered in the background. (Note the striking rock formation on the beach when Marianne first ambles toward the estate over rough terrain; it later makes it into an Orpheus and Eurydice painting Marianne completes. This is easily missed on first watch.) We are so wrapped up in paying attention to the eyes and gestures and faces of the two leads that we don’t realize we’re being taught things.
And these performances are easy to get wrapped up in. Haenel is other-worldly as the angry, closed-off Heloise. (She softens, of course, into the both broken-hearted and open-hearted person who closes out the film.) But the film belongs to Merlant. Despite the egalitarian framing of the two actors, Marianne is, I believe, in every single scene of the film. She is the point-of-view character, and it’s her occasional voiceover that reminds us we’re viewing a memory. Merlant deftly conveys that Marianne is more experienced, more worldly, and older than the somewhat child-like Heloise. Older, but not by much. More worldly, but perhaps not for long. (As it happens, both actors are the same age, thirty-one.)
Merlant and Haenel circle each other for over an hour of the film’s runtime, always seeming on the verge of a personal admission (“I don’t know if I will marry,” Marianne says, casually, averting eye contact for a moment) or about to hold a glance for a nanosecond too long. Rarely have two actors been as convincing as Merlant and Haenel are with respect to portraying the way strong romantic feelings can sometimes seem cooked in a Crock-pot rather than a microwave. Sciamma is in not hurry. There’s a scene at a harpsichord — yet another of Sciamma’s covert setups for a later payoff — in which Marianne, in the midst of a budding friendship, plays melodies from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” for Heloise, who has never heard an orchestra. The shot composition gives us shades of Vermeer’s “The Music Lesson” before cutting in for a two shot. One can practically taste the moment when Heloise softens toward her new pal. Haenel, an actor who has never over-played anything, gives it to us with posture as much as with facial expressions. In a very real sense, where their eyes might dart or glance in a given scene says more than the dialogue.
Eventually, Marianne executes an initial portrait. And it’s not very good, though, of course, her subject never posed. (The artist Helene Delmaire accomplished the artworks depicted in the film, with her hands standing in for Merlant’s.) In one of the story’s satisfying acts of agency, she insists on telling Heloise the truth, who she is and why she’s been there. She insists on showing Heloise the painting.
The revelation ignites the story’s next section, in which the fate of the first painting leads to a second, one where Heloise is willing to pose. This new order of things is attended by Heloise’s mother leaving for five days, enabling the remaining three women, the lovers and the maid Sophie, to form a temporary nuclear family. Without any male energy around, the women are free to bond, share secrets, support one another, and, yes, fall in love. The pacing with which this all comes off will be the stuff of film school legend. The film speeds up but never gallops. Each of its three sections is quicker and more urgent than the last but maintains the same contemplative mood.
Portrait is a quiet work, full of background sounds of fires crackling and heeled shoes clacking against wooden floors. Yet there are two music moments that are so sublime in their execution that they merit mention in any discussion about the film. The first is a bonfire scene that takes place when painter and subject try to help the maid with a problem. They enter a village on the island, seemingly populated by women only. The village women begin chanting an arresting baroque-sounding song while our lovers lock eyes across the fire. Sciamma hard cuts out of the scene after earning her film’s title, but the moment is strangely elegaic and staged with such simplicity that its impact sneaks up on you.
The second music moment constitutes one of the film’s alleged three endings. Which is not altogether accurate. The story has one ending, and it takes place on a staircase. After that, Sciamma tacks on a coda, and the coda is in two parts. Again, Marianne’s voiceover guides us. She saw her a first time, and then a second, and, presumably, never again. Sciamma’s final music moment amounts to a cinematic knockout punch, and feels like one. Our two heroes find themselves inhabiting the same space but not the same place, so to speak. There is literal and figurative time and space between them. One might want to cry for what was lost and what might have been. But, interestingly, Sciamma ends her tale of heartache and loss with melancholic reverie and even a dash of elation. “Don’t regret, remember,” Marianne had told her beloved. This is what art is for.
Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) — FOUR STARS
Directed by Celine Sciamma
Lilies Films
Pyramide Films
Rated R