Rated: M
Directed and Written by: Céline Sciamma
Produced by: Bénédicte Couvreur
Starring: Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luana Bajrami, Valeria Golino.
Is it the ‘Lady’s’ portrait that is on fire or does the title allude to a portrait of a ‘Lady’ who is on fire? Inscribed within the very title is a hint of the subtleties and ambiguities that characterise this deeply intimate romance, winner of the ‘Best Screenplay’ at the Cannes Film Festival.
And from this point on, the enigmas only proliferate.
In the opening scene, a hand clasping a stick of willow charcoal hesitantly traces a black line across the page while the model/tutor posing in front of the class instructs her students and, at the same time, indirectly urges the viewer to, ‘Take the time to look at me.’
Much in the way that an artist will strive to render three dimensional form on a two dimensional surface, noticing the minutiae of form and the way the model’s limbs and torso are affected by the quirks of perspective and the play of light, so too the viewer is invited into a more intense and quiet world where gesture and symbol take on a deeper meaning and sounds emerging from the stillness— waves slapping against a wooden hull, keys jangling, the scratch of charcoal on paper—take on their own musicality.
It is 1760 and Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is travelling to an isolated chateau perched atop a cliff on the Brittany coast to fulfil a commission. She is to paint a wedding portrait for Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), but the work must remain a secret. Her subject, freshly graduated from life in a convent, is clinging on to her first and last moments of freedom before she is offered up for marriage to an Italian nobleman she has yet to meet, and the only way for Héloïse to resist is to prevent her portrait from coming into existence.
While Héloïse has already forbidden one artist to continue painting her, she doesn’t suspect that her new companion may have her own agenda. Not only is Marianne compelled to work in the few moments of daylight she can snatch away from her time with Héloïse, she must also reassemble Héloïse in her memory from the fragmented glances she manages to steal as the two roam the grasslands surrounding the estate and the rugged shoreline below.
As she works at her task Marianne reflects, ‘One must study the ear, even if it is covered.’ With this observation, Marianne does not simply refer to the way that memory and imagination must work together to reconstruct that which is hidden, or the way the folds and whorls of the ear set up a visual rhythm that recalls its function, she also draws our attention to the ear as a motif, with its form a labyrinth at the entrance to a lightless tunnel.
Like the layers Marianne builds up on her canvas—from the initial cartoon marked out in charcoal, through the abstract daubs of paint where features roughly blocked in glow whitely against the raw umber imprimatura, to that moment when a likeness appears as if from a veil of smoke—that first guarded friendship between the artist and her subject forms its own layers, eventually building into a connection that will draw them both through an emotional and philosophical labyrinth to that lightless tunnel at its heart.
