Céline Sciamma
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Perhaps weirdly, I was reminded most of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated classic My Neighbor Totoro, which is a film given to far more extravagant make-believe (flying creatures, a cat that’s also a bus, and the like). But it is also deeply interested in telling a story about children from their eye level, even if weightier concerns are in the background. In Totoro, the main characters’ mother is convalescing from illness.
Production notes cite Hayao Miyazaki as a guiding influence, and, indeed, the film’s delicate marriage of whimsy and wistfulness has perhaps no greater touchstone than My Neighbor Totoro. Sciamma is likewise interested in these moments where innocence abuts experience and youth’s solipsism suffers the first of its many small deaths.
Nelly’s adventures with the young Marion, lacking in dramatic urgency but instructive to children and adults alike, have already garnered copious comparisons to Hayao Miyazaki’s more sedate films like My Neighbor Totoro. And like Miyazaki’s work, what initially seems a straightforward fable about learning to grow up and enter the world becomes just as passionately a paean to remaining young and retaining the best aspects of childhood.
At times the movie feels like a live-action version of Hayao Miyazaki's anime fantasies like Ponyo or My Neighbor Totoro: full of childlike wonderment, but also very matter-of-fact in its approach to magic.
Ammonite (2020)
Directed by Francis Lee
influenced by Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Themes Plot Characters
It would be easy to nod to Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire as a reference point, a lesbian period drama released last year which similarly embraced the seaside air as an opportune backdrop for forbidden romance to fizz and thrive.
It’s certainly unfair that Ammonite is already being compared to Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (released earlier this year), but perhaps only natural, given the similarities the two share, both being beach-set romances between two women.
Winslet’s quick-tempered, taciturn Anning recalls Holly Hunter‘s mute Ada in The Piano , the windy seaside location and the female romance is always going to draw comparison with Céline Sciamma‘s superlative Portrait of a Lady on Fire , and it suffers next to his earlier work.
Through no fault of his own, Lee's film has little choice but to be compared to Céline Sciamma's vastly superior "Portrait of a Lady on Fire," also about two fierce women near the sea, who fall deeply in love, and are devastated to be forced apart.
As early as its trailer, “Ammonite” unavoidably gave off vibes similar to 2019’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”
Ammonite recalls another littoral lesbian costume drama released last year, Céline Sciamma’s 1770-set Portrait of a Lady on Fire , a film that also stumbles as a polemic, railing against the oppression of women artists.
Vertigo (1958)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
influenced Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Characters Visuals
Some in the audience may watch Héloïse and be reminded of the ghostly Carlotta Valdes in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”; later, as she and Marianne lower their guards, they can’t help but evoke the leads of Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona.”
A partir de ahí Sciamma se balancea entre una intriga y obsesión casi estilo Hitchcock (piensen en Vértigo y las miradas atentas y desesperadas de James Stewart hacia una desinteresada Kim Novak) y que ronda a lo erótico desde el primer segundo (ese juego de rostros que se ven por primera vez en la playa de la isla, toma larga de nítido sentido del humor), para después jugar con figuras íntimas de intrusión y curiosidades humanas y serias.
Consider Kim Novak’s golden spiral of a bun in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo as her character, Madeleine, gazes at a painting that eerily resembles her while a private detective (James Stewart) tails her around San Francisco—a job that turns into his personal obsession.
Persona (1966)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
influenced Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Characters Visuals
Some in the audience may watch Héloïse and be reminded of the ghostly Carlotta Valdes in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”; later, as she and Marianne lower their guards, they can’t help but evoke the leads of Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona.”
Much of that power belongs in the imaginative complexity of stillness in cinematographer Claire Mathon’s imagery, riffing on the imagery of men such as Persona and The French Lieutenant’s Woman .
By the end of the film, which visually references a scene in Jonathan Glazer‘s Birth , he only realized then how much he was in love with it.
It's a proper coup de theatre, literally, and may have taken away the crown for Best Performance Showing in One Shot a Woman Experiencing Cathartic Feelings as She Listens to Classical Music that's been held by Nicole Kidman since 2004 for her work in Jonathan Glazer's Birth .
The film's press notes cite Miyazaki as a major inspiration, with the “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away” vibes growing especially pronounced over the course of a story that blurs the soft borders between real and invented worlds.
Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche
influenced Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Themes Visuals
Portrait of a Lady on Fire never becomes graphic, especially compared to the controversial Blue is the Warmest Color , but the erotic nature of their relationship cannot be ignored.
As someone with Blue is the Warmest Color barely carving out a spot on my top 50 of the decade list I plan on sharing sometime in December, Portrait of a Lady on Fire challenges me to rethink the authenticity of that film regardless of how powerful I found it to be.
Films such as Blue is the Warmest Color and Disobedience deliver just that through prolonged sex scenes that are borderline pornographic and weak storytelling.
In fact, she is so deliberate in her “Portrait” that one cannot ignore the filmmaker’s oblique opposition to the cold and soft-core sex scenes of "Blue is the Warmest Color," another love story of the recent LGBTQ canon, but one shot from the unfortunate POV of the male gaze (an admittedly overused but fitting term here.)
Only Call Me by Your Name and Blue is the Warmest Color have been as successful in finding the specific queerness in their initial attraction, perfectly balancing tepid hesitation with unrelinquished excitement within their shared kinship as “others.”
Even then, the payoff for all the film’s sexual tension proves to be largely intellectual, expressed primarily through words rather than the kind of torrid lovemaking scenes Cannes witnessed with “Blue Is the Warmest Color.”
Marieme (Karidja Touré) lives the “banlieue life” amid the housing projects of Paris, cemented in the cinematic imagination by the grainy monochrome hues of Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 film La Haine .
An (American) football game is in progress, but the players beneath the pads are all female, mostly black, and speak a slangy colloquial French: they are, as the French title has it, a “Bande des Filles,” a gang of girls from the same notorious Parisian suburbs that spawned “La Haine.”
It's been almost 20 years since Mathieu Kassovitz's trenchant foray into a tough outer-Parisian banlieue in La Haine, and on many levels there are parallels with the ethnically mixed, economically disadvantaged underclass examined in Sciamma's film.
Newcomer Karidja Touré plays Marieme, an initially shy high-school student growing up in one of the high-rise tower blocks made so notorious in 1995's La Haine, a film to which Sciamma owes much.
Indeed, Sciamma has crafted one of the best filmic love stories of the 21st century; it joins romantic masterpieces like In the Mood for Love , Before Sunset , Bright Star , and Carol in its capacity to give us a picture of authentic erotic love without ever devolving into the lewd or obscene.
Aunque no cuenta con las virtudes formales y plásticas de relatos similares, como La edad de la inocencia (Scorsese, 1993) o Carol (Haynes, 2015), Sciamma demuestra en su final, estructurado alrededor de tres despedidas y un encuentro/revelación, que ha adquirido una aguda fineza como narradora, con la que logra construir con seguridad el camino para llegar a un estado de conmoción genuino, de un tiempo de concepción tan breve como el de una chispa de fuego en la cola de un vestido.
Before I saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I was thinking I'd maybe start this review by point out how the 2010s weirdly became the decade of the lesbian romantic drama, and how the three best love stories of the decade to this point, 2014's The Duke of Burgundy , 2015's Carol , and 2016's The Handmaiden , were all about relationships between women but directed by men, and isn't that an odd something that we could probably make something out of.
Quite reminiscent of the critical discourse that surrounded Todd Haynes’ Carol in 2015, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire has evoked passionate reactions from the majority of film critics who have seen it, while its naysayers have largely sung the same tune: that it’s too cold, too slow, too inert, too uninvolving.
She plays propaganda games like lesser filmmakers, such as Todd Haynes, whose lesbian melodrama Carol made homosexuality tendentious.
You might think at first of Todd Haynes’s Carol , all read-between-the-lines looks.
Two English Girls (1971)
Directed by François Truffaut
influenced Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Visuals
Portrait of a Lady on Fire — a bold title fusing Henry James’s psychological acuity to Alicia Keys’s pop audacity — should have been as sensually powerful as Truffaut’s Brontë-esque films The Story of Adèle H. and Two English Girls, while cinematographer Claire Mathon also evokes the neoclassical palette of Rohmer’s The Marquise of O. Instead, it’s as sentimental and predictable as Carol .
The Story of Adèle H. (1975)
Directed by François Truffaut
influenced Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Visuals
Portrait of a Lady on Fire — a bold title fusing Henry James’s psychological acuity to Alicia Keys’s pop audacity — should have been as sensually powerful as Truffaut’s Brontë-esque films The Story of Adèle H. and Two English Girls, while cinematographer Claire Mathon also evokes the neoclassical palette of Rohmer’s The Marquise of O. Instead, it’s as sentimental and predictable as Carol .
The Marquise of O (1976)
Directed by Éric Rohmer
influenced Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Visuals
Portrait of a Lady on Fire — a bold title fusing Henry James’s psychological acuity to Alicia Keys’s pop audacity — should have been as sensually powerful as Truffaut’s Brontë-esque films The Story of Adèle H. and Two English Girls, while cinematographer Claire Mathon also evokes the neoclassical palette of Rohmer’s The Marquise of O. Instead, it’s as sentimental and predictable as Carol .
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)
Directed by Jane Schoenbrun
influenced by Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Themes
After its Cannes premiere, critics were throwing around comparisons to Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and while both are interrogations of what it means to be both the observer and the observed when it comes to art, the tensions in Portrait of a Lady on Fire are scalding.
The director also compared the film’s concept to the acclaimed French movie, Portrait of a Lady on Fire set in a Friday the 13th sequel.
The comparison with Jane Campion’s Palme D’or winner, The Piano , is an obvious one to make, but when the credits roll 120 minutes later it is obvious that Sciamma’s picture stands tall on its own merit.
Not since Jane Campion’s The Piano has a costume drama presented such a gorgeous view of love from a woman’s point of view, as in Portrait of a Lady on Fire .
La Pointe Courte (1956)
Directed by Agnès Varda
influenced Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Visuals
As soon as director Sciamma executes the first interaction between Marianne and Héloïse by visually referencing an iconic shot in Agnes Varda‘s La Pointe Courte , this reviewer knew he was going to like Portrait of a Lady on Fire very much.
In this stunt ending, Sciamma seems to have forgotten her previous invocation of Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, when Marianne and Héloïse ponder an artist’s choice between love and memory.
It is not that simple, any more than past films like Personal Best (1981), Bound (1996), or Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013) were strictly about a same-sex topic in their day.
La Belle Noiseuse (1991)
Directed by Jacques Rivette
influenced Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Themes
Not content to rival Jacques Rivette’s long, extended artist-and-model nude collaboration scenes in the Eighties art-house hit La Belle Noiseuse (an adaptation of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece ), Sciamma betrays her cinematic heritage.
The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
Directed by Jane Campion
influenced Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Visuals
With nothing to do with Henry James’ The Portrait Of A Lady (just in case you were wondering), this offers a beautifully quiet and poised performance from Merlant, although Haenel at times seems to think she’s in Alain Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad , and therefore stands around expressionlessly and offering really… really… long… pauses in between her line-readings.
Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Directed by Alain Resnais
influenced Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Visuals
With nothing to do with Henry James’ The Portrait Of A Lady (just in case you were wondering), this offers a beautifully quiet and poised performance from Merlant, although Haenel at times seems to think she’s in Alain Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad , and therefore stands around expressionlessly and offering really… really… long… pauses in between her line-readings.