Not everything is fleeting. Some feelings are deep.
In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a young artist arrives at an isolated estate; her goal is to paint a portrait of the young woman who lives there, but, since this young woman is refusing to sit for a portrait, the artist will pose as a companion and her art will be the product of subterfuge. From this wonderful hook, writer-director Sciamma spins out a rich, profoundly beautiful, deeply moving and near perfect meditation on art and relationship. The film is astoundingly well shot; I was surprised to find out that the entire film was shot on digital; I guess I’m still enough of a luddite to think there are depths of richness that you can’t get except on film, but I suppose I was wrong. Whether it’s a gorgeous day on a windswept, rock-strewn beach or the quiet gleam of a single candle in a room shrouded in darkness, Sciamma and her cinematographer, Claire Mathon, create colors of incredible vibrancy and darknesses you can get lost in. I wish I’d gotten to this in the theater, it’s so visually striking. The Criterion Blu-Ray is your next best bet. It feels like a painting come to life sometimes, the way the faces are cast in shadow and light or the way the women of the film are framed on a grassy hillside. Speaking of the painting, this film makes the scenes of Marianne creating her art meditative, hypnotic and tactile; you can see the fine grain in the paint as she places it on the canvas. Artist Helene Delmaire provided the paintings and also did the painting on-screen when all you see are the hands; you can tell it’s a real artist from the way her hands and arms move as she visualizes and then lays down the paint. Noemie Merlant gets that too; the way she looks at the canvas and then away and then back, the way her eyes move and the way she studies everything absolutely embodies and summarizes the character as both painter and person. Adele Haenel is every bit as good as the enigmatic subject; she’s captivating in all the right ways and the way Merlant and Haenel work together creates a fantastic sense of a real relationship, growing, changing, fluctuating. The power dynamics are constantly shifting as are the roles they’re playing. In supporting roles, Luana Bajrami really knocks it out of the park as the maid and Valeria Golina, veteran character actor, is absolute perfection in the couple of scenes she gets.
Now, what I will say is that I feel the film kind of loses steam in that third act. I don’t think it’s a spoiler at this point to reveal that the complex relationship between these two women does eventually become romantic. Now obviously, I don’t have a problem with lesbian romance on screen; but I do feel that their relationship is much more interesting before it gets boiled down to them being “in love.” It feels less like a deepening of their relationship and more like a simplification if that makes sense. This is a problem I have with a lot of movies and TV shows, I guess; their relationship is really complex, both emotionally and intellectually, and I find relationships that are deeply intimate without being romantic more interesting and compelling than relationships that are, you know, romantic. It’s the old Mulder & Scully problem. As the relationship hardens into something more traditional, the acting also changes. Both Merlant and Haenel are exquisite when they’re giving small performances. These characters are both, because of the way society views women at this time, cautious and careful about their expressions; they are both always feeling and thinking more than they’re saying and the depth of the performances capture all of that. In the last quarter of the film, I’d say, the emotions start coming out and the performances get more exterior and more melodramatic. I’m not saying they’re bad. Not at all. I just found the characters and the performances better when they were more minimal and leaving a lot of things unsaid. Still, even that last quarter of the film is quite beautiful and better by a mile than a lot of films, so I’m not really deducting points from the movie for that last half hour or so, even if it doesn’t hold up as well as the first hour and a half. Again, it’s perhaps mostly down to the fact that the first three-quarters of this movie is basically so perfect that I was holding my breath, just filmmaking at the level of the immaculate in every area. The movie, taken as a whole, is still a magnificent, beautiful, ravishing film and Sciamma, a filmmaker I wasn’t familiar with, is definitely on my radar now. This one’s a masterpiece. Can’t wait to see what comes next. 4 stars.
tl;dr – ravishingly beautiful, nearly immaculate film is a compelling meditation on art and relationship; the film doesn’t exactly finish strong, but it’s still a must-watch. 4 stars.