Adéle Haenel, who plays Héloïse in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, claps her hands and yells, “Bravo, pedophilia!” after walking out in protest of the César awards naming Roman Polanski best director. She is the star, alongside Noémie Merlant, who plays Marianne, in Céline Sciamma’s film about two women who fall in love on an island in 18th-century France. The film has been praised for abandoning the male gaze and creating, instead, a lesbian one, full of subtle looks and attention to small details, like the curve of an ear, or the placement of one’s hands. The visual language, composed of many close-up shots of their faces and ethereal tracking shots of the women walking on the isolated beach, their lips and mouths but not ears veiled by sheer cloth, apparently meant to protect them from the wind, doesn’t seem to depart fully from what Scianna says is ninety percent of cinema [the male gaze]. This does not mean that Scianna has failed to create a certain kind of lesbian gaze, but perhaps, that a lesbian gaze is sometimes not very different from an objectifying male gaze.
Héloïse was a nun who enjoyed the feeling of equality and the library at the convent until she was pulled out by her mother to marry a Milanese man she has never met. She refuses the marriage by refusing to pose for a portrait that, if approved by the gentleman, would settle the arrangement. Marianne is a painter with no plans to marry. She was hired to paint Héloïse in secret, who thinks she is a companion for walks. When the women fall in love, Héloïse decides to let Marianne paint her, giving herself o Marianne and at the same time sealing her fate to be given away.
In one scene, Héloïse is posing for Marianne when she calls her over. The sexual tension seems more palpable from the actors themselves than from the characters, as they stand extremely close to one another, quivering. They point out each other's small gestures, such as Marianne breathing through her mouth when she is troubled. The scene calls upon the one from Bergman's Cries and Whispers, where a man stands behind his wife in the mirror and describes the small details of her face while critiquing her person, although the audience is meant to believe that Héloïse and Marianne only love each other's gestures. The problem for me was that if sometimes we saw Marianne through Héloïse's perspective, I didn't always love of all of her gestures.
Marianne: I’ll remember when you fell asleep in the kitchen.
Héloïse: I’ll remember your dark look when I beat you at cards.
Marianne: I’ll remember the first time you laughed.
Héloïse: You took your time being funny.
It is understandable that the women don’t have much to say about each other at the end of their five-day honeymoon, but if there was a chance we were to believe in a hidden depth to these moments we all witnessed, it was subsequently strangled by the self-reference. I don’t remember Marianne ever being funny. This happens again at the end of the film when, in a National Treasuresque moment, Marianne rips through a crowd to witness another portrait of her ex-lover and child, slyly flashing the pg. 28 of Héloïse’s book where Marianne had sketched a sexy self-portrait as a keep-sake.
The love-story of Marianne and Héloïse is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, that Héloïse reads to Marianne and the maid, Sophie, in the middle of the film. In order to bring his lover back to life, Orpheus must lead her out of the underworld but without looking back at her, which he does the moment before they reach the surface, banishing her to the underworld forever. Marianne thinks that Orpheus made the poet’s choice over the lover’s choice, choosing the everlasting memory of their love rather than Eurydice herself. Héloïse offers that perhaps it was Eurydice that told him to do so. This is the choice that both Marianne, by painting, and Héloïse, by allowing herself to be painted, make in the film, a love preserved through art and representation rather than the lover herself. By positioning the women as the ones telling, looking, painting, Scianna is feminizing the poet. It is not just men, then, that can choose the imaginary woman over the actual woman, his dream over her reality. When Sophie is recuperating from getting an abortion that morning, Héloïse drags her out of bed, lays her down on a mattress near the fire, and poses as the abortionist; “We are going to paint.” Marianne’s eyes light up, she is inspired.
Sophie is the strongest, most subtle character in the film. She barely cries when the herbalist’s baby grabs her face in the middle of the abortion, and you don’t pity but respect her. It is only characters like hers that remain uncorrupted by art made about her.