I had heard lots of good things about Portrait of A Lady on Fire before going in, and in no uncertain terms, it set the bar for how love should be seen in film. Its quietness, its reflectiveness, and its ultimate catharsis despite its heartbreaking conclusion make it one of the most beautiful films I have seen.
There is something so captivating about realistic depictions of love in film. When a story so deftly portrays the depths of our capacity for affection, and the quietly affecting tenderness that dares only show itself in stolen glances and wry smiles. This is possibly one of the hardest things for a film to achieve, mainly because each viewer will have a different experience with love, and will look for it in ways that they can relate to. With the myriad of tools available to cinema, few of its efforts have found universality in the expansive and varied nature of love stories. There are of course stories that form the very backbone of how we conceive love on screen, with Romeo serenading Juliet from her balcony window, but I have not seen many films that have dared to truly show both the realities and the unpredictability of love.
Portrait of A Lady on Fire is a 2019 French drama, and it follows a young artist Marianne (Noémie Merlant) who has been commissioned to paint a portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) as she is to be married off, against her wishes, to a nobleman. Over the course of a few days, they fall into a passionate and inevitably doomed love affair.
This is a very brief description, and one that does not really do the film justice. Portrait of A Lady on Fire is so much more than its plot. It’s the performances, tinged with longing and hesitation, it’s the cinematography that relies on natural light and finds both women at their most unfiltered and free. Portrait of A Lady on Fire is a film that crackles with desire, pain and hope, finding all of these contrasting emotions at their most distilled and carnal. The emotiveness of the film is not overly complicated or distant. The power of its love for Marianne and Héloïse’s love distils what should be a wildness of emotional confusion into blistering simplicity. This is not to say that the emotions seen on screen do not take time and patience to emerge—there are plenty of communication errors early on from both women—but when they finally reveal themselves to each other, all those complications fade away and understanding is the only thing that remains. That is the true, simple beauty that lies at the core of Portrait of A Lady on Fire.
It is easy to get carried away with all of this rich language, and it might convince you that this film is too pretentious or in love with itself to be taken seriously. This is not the case, and the main reason for that is the two central performances from Merlant and Haenel, which are key to grounding the story in believability. The emotions of love and longing are rich, but the performances are anything but calm or collected. Both of these women are guarded people who take a long time to open up. They stumble over each other, and even though the film consistently looks stunning and effortless, the performances instead emulate an awkwardness that captures the reality of anxious connection within the beautiful look of the film. A lot goes unsaid, and both leads capture this through their body language. Their stances are insular, and they each look unconfident in their burgeoning realisations of love.
All of this is brought together by the cinematography and camera work. In many ways, Portrait of A Lady on Fire looks like a painting, with deep candlelight oranges and piercing sea blues illustrating the intensity of the two women’s connection. This impression is only enhanced by the framing, which paints the characters in the environments they exist in. The island they inhabit feels isolated, and through shots that never stray too far from the character’s sides, the island becomes their home in a very short period of time. Characters never become dwarfed by their surroundings, the subtlety of their behaviour complementing the lavish set design. Nothing is overdone, and at its best lends a grandiosity to the piece that elevates the stakes of their story. The grandiosity does not get in the way of the personal intimacy shared, and with the characters focused on over the setting, Portrait of A Lady on Fire seeks to enshrine the beauty of Marianne and Héloïse.
The type of love story that is able to transcend the specificity of the subject, it turns out, is the type of love story that is not afraid to reveal the tragedies of love beneath the layers that wrap around it. The tragedy of Portrait of A Lady on Fire feels inevitable, as all great tragedies should. But, underneath the explicit tragedy of the situation—two lovers who can only be together for a short while—comes the implicit knowledge that their time together, whilst brief, was all-consuming.
As you can probably tell, I will fall over myself using all of the over-the-top hyperbole I can think of to describe this film. I do not want to dissuade you with these lofty praises, because at its core, past the English subtitles and glossy aesthetic, Portrait of A Lady on Fire is a remarkably simple film that finds beauty in heartache.
It might surprise you to know that I only watched Portrait of A Lady on Fire in early July of this year. To say it stuck with me is an understatement, and it has quickly become one of my favourite films. Avoiding the aforementioned hyperbole of this piece, if I could try and summarise Portrait of A Lady on Fire, I would say this: it is both a love story, and a story about love.
Words by James Evenden
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