Men not required in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire shows you don’t need men to spin a lush tale of love, art and desire.

Adele Haenel as Heloise and Noemie Merlant as Marianne in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Picture: Neon via AP

Cooking, seeing, looking back, returning the gaze: these actions and reactions are at the heart of Celine Sciamma’s brilliant, sensuous, rigorous film.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which won best screenplay at Cannes this year, is set in France in 1770. It is Sciamma’s first period work, after three features that focused on different aspects of contemporary female adolescence.

Much of it is in the form of a feature-length flashback, framed by two moments of contemplation of very different kinds. In a way, Sciamma says, the first scene tells you almost everything you need to know about the movie. She means, above all, the opening line, “Take the time to look at me”, spoken by one of her two central characters. The instruction might seem simple and straightforward, but it turns out to have many applications. It’s a key, Sciamma says, “that gives away the contract of the film”.Portrait has a measured pace, but it can be subtle, intense, startling at times, and its final scene has a devastating impact.

This opening scene, she says, tells you something else about what is to come. “It’s a sequence with a slow rhythm. I think it’s honest with people, it’s saying, OK, it is going to be like this, come on now.”

The film opens with a painting class. A woman is sitting for half a dozen or so female students. She is their model as well as their teacher: that first line is her injunction to her pupils.

Then there’s an unexpected interruption that sets the next part of the film in train. The students had discovered a painting and brought it out of storage. It’s one of the teacher’s works, and its retrieval unsettles her. She tells them its title. It is called Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

The flashback begins with a woman in transit, a passenger on board a rowboat. This is the artist, Marianne (Noemie Merlant), who has come to an isolated location on the coast of Brittany to fulfil a commission. She has been asked to paint the portrait of a young woman, Heloise (Adele Haenel), that will be sent to her prospective suitor, a Milanese nobleman. The painting is a kind of prenuptial sales pitch.

The catch is that Heloise has refused to sit for her portrait, for reasons that are not initially clear. A male painter has already left the island, unable to complete the commission.

Heloise’s mother, the countess (Valeria Golino), has come up with a solution. She will pretend that Marianne has been hired to be her daughter’s companion. During the day, the artist will spend time with Heloise and observe her: at night, she will work covertly on the portrait.

Before long, the assignment becomes complicated by many things: by the growing attraction and sense of complicity between the two women; by the shifting relationship between painter and subject, by the blurring of the distinction between the observer and the observed. Whatever is happening is no longer a transaction. It’s a to-and-fro, an exchange, which was echoed in the way the film was made, Sciamma says.

“There was this very weird meta thing, because I was looking at Adele, telling Adele what to do, and Noemie would be looking at me, then portraying Marianne and our DP” — director of photography Claire Mathon — “would be looking at Noemie looking at me … this whole thing was super-collaborative and so embodied, it was such an experience, really.”

In creating a strong sense of the artist at work, Sciamma wanted to make sure that we saw the development of Marianne’s portraits of Heloise. She needed an artist, a woman, ideally someone of Marianne’s age, to produce these works in various stages. In the end she found Helene Delmaire, a painter from Lille, on Instagram.

It was a much more difficult process than Sciamma had anticipated. “It was the first collaboration,” she says, “because we had to begin months before the actual shooting and it was really teamwork with Claire Mathon, to find the right balance”, filming Delmaire as she was producing six or seven versions of Marianne’s two portraits.

Sciamma’s movie is about the making of art, but it is also about the telling of stories and the power of myth. One of the most potent of its elements is the mythical story of Orpheus and Eurydice, a tale of loss and longing, of looking and letting go. Its presence in the film seems essential, deeply ingrained: yet, says Sciamma, it was one of the last things she incorporated into the screenplay.

Filmmaker Celine Sciamma. Picture: AP

“I felt something was missing,” she says. She wanted her three characters — Marianne, Heloise and the young maid of the house, Sophie (Luana Bajrami) — to have a relaxing evening together. She chose a story for them to read aloud and discuss, a tale translated from Ovid. It tells of Orpheus, musician and poet, in mourning for his late wife, Eurydice, who goes down to the underworld to beg the god Hades to return her to life. Hades agrees, on one condition: Orpheus must walk out of the underworld with his wife behind him and he must not on any account look back. What the end of the story means is something the three women debate; its significance resonates throughout the movie.

Once Sciamma had picked this story, she says, something happened. “It spread out into the film, organically. It’s the presence of a love story, and the memory of a love story. It creates a unity between the two timelines of the film.”

This discovery “was like a dream, actually”, a kind of serendipity, she says, “that’s the good thing about writing”. To her surprise, she also came across some intriguing feminist interpretations of the myth that recast traditional interpretations of love and control that are usually applied to it.

Music — Orpheus’s means of expression — is a surprising aspect of the film, in part because of its apparent absence. Sciamma chose not to have a score, she says, “because I want to put you (the viewer), in the same position as the characters”, cut off from music in this isolated place. Heloise, who has been brought up in a convent for much of her life, knows only sacred song. She has never heard an orchestra, she tells Marianne.

The absence of a score, Sciamma says, can be a way “to play with the idea of the impact of music in cinema, and how important it is to ravish people’s hearts”. Music, she says, “is also special effects”.

There are, however, some moments of musical performance in Portrait that become part of the narrative, in ways that can be both fleeting and remarkable. One of them draws on a familiar composer, Vivaldi, and a familiar work that will never quite seem the same again.

“I knew I was using Vivaldi, which is very democratic classical music,” Sciamma says. She also wanted another piece of music with a very different impact, a chant sung by a group of women clustered around a bonfire, in a scene that provides one of the film’s most striking images. The piece was composed by Arthur Simonini, whom she met at film school and who has written music for all her movies. “I really wanted to create an anthem for the film, to have this song with this very high-rated BPM, a kind of a trance, that would be polyphonic and polyrhythmic,” she says, and that carried the suggestion of witches.

Sciamma supplied the words for the chant. “It’s an adaptation of a Nietzsche quotation that I translated into bad Latin,” she says. The Nietzsche sentence is “the higher we rise, the smaller we seem to those who cannot fly”.

And there’s yet another kind of music in the film: the sound of people breathing. “I’m very obsessed with that,” Sciamma says, “because it’s the music of the heart of the character.” For various scenes, she says, she would calculate the number of times she wanted characters to breathe in and out as they moved. “To be really, really accurate on the set, every step they took to go one to another, it has its own groove, I would say, you don’t do it in five, you do it in six. And they knew when they had to breathe out and breathe in at some point … it’s a very, very important thing to me.”

Portrait of a Lady on Fire deals with both desire and love, elements that were both significant to Sciamma in the way that they contradicted expectations. “Because desire, especially in French cinema, is something that is rarely, rarely shown.” And the love story, she says, “is departing from conventions of conflict. That’s why there is no man in the film, because otherwise there would be a conflict, and I’m trying to get rid of the narrative where everything relies on conflict”.

There is desire, but there is also exploration and expression, and that makes a difference, Sciamma says. Traditionally, in cinema, “the lesbian love stories are always painful, punished and they don’t exist, and we need to say that they exist, and to look at this love in its possibility, rather than when it’s an impossibility”.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is in cinemas on Boxing Day.