World of Women

Portrait of a Lady on Fire a film by Celine Sciamma.  With Noemie Merlant, Adele Haenel, Luana Bajrami, Valeria Golino. *****

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is set on an estate in 18^th century Brittany, and in an early scene an artist named Marianne (Noemie Merlant) travels there, rowed by a group of men; from the time they drop her off until very late in the movie, not another man appears.  There is a Countess (Valeria Golino) but no Count, and no working men around.  There is a purity to the movie that has to do with gender; when a guy showed up in a late scene I found it shocking, and thought, What the hell is he doing here?  In a way this world without men seems a fantasy, but I entirely bought into it.  I didn’t want it to end.

La Comtesse wants a portrait of her daughter Heloise (Adele Haenel) because she has a suitor in Milan—whom she hasn’t met—and he’ll marry her if he likes how she looks.  A portrait of La Comtesse hangs in the front hall, painted by Marianne’s father.  Heloise is so angry at this situation that she refuses to pose; an earlier artist, a man, tried and failed.  Marianne must pretend to be a walking companion for Heloise, and in the process observe her enough to create the portrait.  This is very much a movie about the creation of a work of art.  And the movie is itself a work of art, each frame beautifully composed.

It’s also about the place of women in the world, the particular world they’re in but also the world in general.  Heloise had a sister who died by falling, or jumping, from the cliffs near the estate; the implication is that she felt stifled by her situation and took that way out.  Heloise seems deeply unhappy as the movie opens; her perpetual scowl is a real challenge for Marianne, because it won’t do for a portrait.  The servant girl Sophie (Luana Bojrami) is similarly in bondage—she’s pregnant but can’t have the child, presumably because she’d lose her job—and midway through the movie the women go to a festival where a group of women is chanting the phrase “non possunt fugere,” Latin for “They can’t escape” (though they chant with an air of delight).  Marianne seems the one truly free woman, because she has her art to fall back on.  But of course she is dependent on the whims of patrons like La Comtesse.

The movie is also a portrait of two women falling in love.  It’s not a spoiler to say that because director Celine Sciamma has spoken of it in public, and the trailer more or less gives it away.  The film has a shipboard romance feeling (though it doesn’t take place on a ship): there is a short period of days when these two can be together, surrounded by women, in a kind of paradise.  Then they will go back to reality.  Heloise will marry her suitor.  Marianne will go off to paint a subject that La Comtesse has given her as a reference.  Sophie, having taken care of her pregnancy, will return to being a servant.

Marianne succeeds in creating a first portrait without her subject’s knowledge, but Heloise doesn’t like it; Marianne is so hurt that she defaces the painting, nearly losing the commission altogether.  But La Comtesse agrees to let her try again (while she herself is to be away for a while), and as the women get closer the portrait gets better.  It is only once they’re lovers that Marianne really captures her.  The final portrait seems perfectly to capture the woman we’ve seen in the film.

At the heart of the movie is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, which the three young women read together and discuss.  Orpheus famously descended into the underworld to rescue his great love, who had died young.  The god of the underworld will let him take her back if they agree to his conditions, especially that Orpheus not look back at Eurydice as they’re making their way out.  He famously looks back and loses her forever, though the women disagree about his motivation.

The situation parallels that of the two women; Marianne will lose Heloise if she creates a portrait that pleases her suitor—perhaps she will lose her anyway—but she does create a marvelous portrait; as she says about Orpheus, she makes the choice of the artist, not the lover.  Heloise thinks it might have been Eurydice who told Orpheus to turn around, as if she didn’t want to go back.  Later in her career Marianne paints an Orpheus and Eurydice, though she puts her father’s name on it.  It seems to represent her memory of her own experience.

The scenes of the two women falling in love, and finally making their love physical, are exquisite, also sometimes startling.  And the most memorable scene in the movie—though I won’t say why—is that of Sophie’s abortion.  All of these scenes take place in an atmosphere of women caring for women, in a way that only women do.

The IMdb website suggests that the original title Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Fer was translated this way to make reference to Henry James.  The same thought occurred to me (strictly speaking, the translation is incorrect).  But I think the French title is a glancing reference to the second volume of Proust, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs.  Young girls in flower become young girls on fire.  It might be the fire of passion, as the movie suggests.  It might also be the fire of anger.  There’s plenty of reason for that.