Review: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (dir. Céline Sciamma)

The Invention of Intimacy

The love language of woman is subtle and profound; it’s a wave hitting your body in the sea. It might just be the water and the wind but it is something about the consistent rhythm with which it hits your body that pierces your heart. May be that is why they say, “give your tears to the ocean, it will take them away.”

This enticing intimacy, which hesitantly gives in to someone’s gaze and dares to bare itself open underneath the scorching sun, even with the bones shaking with fear is the love of a woman.

img courtesy: imdb

Potrait of a Lady on Fire directed by Céline Sciamma, is gentle and nurturing, exactly the way a woman loves and wishes to be loved. It disregards the objectifying male gaze and much like Agnes Varda “decides to look back” at every eye which looks at it. It’s friendship and appreciation. It’s acceptance and feeling. Helenois embodies bravery and resilience in her misery, gently confronting the pain of abandoning her love, because it wishes her to. A feminine representation of feminine desire & way of being, expresses itself in a matriarchal form, where a woman’s body doesn’t shelter a patriarchal expectation but instead chooses to place another woman upon its anatomy beforehand.

The dialogues are simple, so is the narrative. But the subtle details are where the magic lies which highlight the ordinary, fleeting gestures in a still light of being devoured. We, as audience are not only exposed to, but also experiencing the innocent and chaste drive of love. Our viewing of the film is an act of consumption, of a matriarchal expression of love. This consumption paves way for a peaceful understanding towards the end of the film, which becomes about two human beings and ‘not’ women just being in love and living with it. Noemie Merlant and Adele Haenel personify this innocent drive of love and every emotion which rides its wave. Much of their acting brilliance lies in their eyes, which gently allow the viewers to step into their world and become a part of their love story.

img courtesy: imdb

The mesmerizing cinematography of the film truly resembles a portrait no matter where a pause is placed. The vibrant colour palette of the film mostly makes use of primary colours to accompany the plainness of the narrative by giving it a warm and naturalistic elegance. Majority of the sequences embody a still eye-level shot and let the gaze of the actors penetrate both the cinematic universe and their audience. The mise-en-scène and shot composition bring forward multiple layers of metaphors, thus establishing a multi-layered meaning to a singular shot. Lastly, the surprising element of the film is its musical choice. The film for the most part allows natural sounds to aid the progressing narrative, which works just as intended by affixing our registration of it. However, when given the chance, the crucial few musical moments of the film bring a prodigious potency to the entireity of the film to make up for their lost screen-time. Simply put, every element of the film ranging from mise-en-scene to editing to sound to shot distance and duration, all work in tandem with the narrative to add multiple layers of naturalism to this tale of intimacy.