'Portrait of a Lady on Fire': Love, art, continued emancipation

MANILA, PHILIPPINES, June 5 ------ 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' is a sapphic coming-of-age romance centered on how love can empower, emancipate, and persist through art. It’s been 574 days since I saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire for the first time. I took a taxi from Katipunan to catch the first screening in Makati. When we entered, the cinema barely had an audience for the afternoon screening. I seated myself away from my friends because I wanted a cinematic experience of my own.

As soon as it ended, I sank into my chair as I cried knowing that I had seen a film you'd be lucky enough to witness at least once in your lifetime. In this isolated island in Brittany, we encounter the faces of womanhood that have been lost and ignored throughout (cinematic) history. Portrait of a Lady on Fire tells the story of Marianne (stunningly portrayed by Noémie Merlant), an 18th-century painter, who is commissioned to secretly paint Heloise (embodied by the brilliant Adèle Haenel), an aristocrat who refuses to pose for her wedding portrait in anticipation of her marriage to an unknown Milanese man.

As the narrative unfolds, we learn why Heloise resists being painted and see her relationship with Marianne grow closer.

Female freedom

History has always had its way in opposing female freedom, and it is wonderful to see that the narrative fights against that. Whenever men are brought into the frame, I often find myself recoiling at the image of this perfect society being disrupted. It leaves me sometimes to wonder: What would it be like if women felt safe enough in spaces to truly bask in their liberties?

Portrait of a Lady on Fire creates a world of women whose liberation is bound with one another, who work together, and who ultimately free one another. We get to see their roles reversed (as the maid is served by the aristocrats) and their spaces temporarily rid of their class separations (as they all sleep in the same bedroom). It's not for the development of any male storylines and not through the kind of suffering we are accustomed (or even complicit) to seeing women go through.

Many critics have already focused on how the film deconstructs the artist and the muse, and how the rise in desire between the two lovers is captured on film through the female gaze. But what amazes me still is how the film illustrates friendship, camaraderie, and agency in a time of oppression. There is a rebellion against the patriarchal presence that looms over them, but is never truly physically present.

This is exemplified by the character of Sophie. Filipino telenovelas and countless other films have trained us to expect the maid (played by the underrated gem Luana Bajrami) to be involved in the intimate details of the lovers’ affair. Yet we get to know that she is busy with her own set of problems — culminating in the film’s most radical image depicting her getting an abortion as she plays with a baby beside her.

It is in these smaller, more intimate moments that I find the film quietly profound. Céline treats each of these women as humans on-screen — with agency and clarity in their objectives, desires, and needs. Sophie decides to get an abortion, Marianne defies social norms in her painting, and Heloise rejects being a passive receiver of the fate handed down to her by her deceased sister.

There are other images and details that reinforce this rebellion and this act of returning what is lost throughout the film. The costume design by Dorothée Guiraud includes subtle details such as pockets in gowns, while Claire Mathon’s visually indelible cinematography creates a painting from each frame through hues that "shouldn’t exist" for the time period but do.

This was the first film I watched from writer-director Céline Sciamma and, after this, I immediately decided to watch the rest of her filmography (on MUBI). As it turns out, her entire body of work is an ode to female narratives that often remain unseen — all told within their specific, almost solitary bubbles. In her debut Water Lilies, she depicts the accompanying rise of desire and envy during adolescence through the tale of synchronized swimming. Her sophomore feature Tomboy, my favorite of her initial trilogy, explores the formative and stifling nature of gender and the value of siblinghood to a child new to a neighborhood. Her third film, Girlhood, is a love letter to female companionship and solidarity in times of conflict and poverty, especially for Black girls growing up in France.

To delve into these films would take another few thousand words. But what must be said is that in each of these films, she loudly proclaims "you exist!" to these women. Portrait is no different.

Source: rappler.com