Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Directed by Céline Sciamma
On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman.
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What critics say influenced Portrait of a Lady on Fire
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.
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 .
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.”
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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.
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 .
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 .
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 .
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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 .
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.