France, 2019
Directed by Céline Sciamma
With Noémie Merlant (Marianne), Adèle Haenel (Héloïse), Valeria Golino (the Countess), Luàna Bajrami (Sophie)
In 1770, Marianne, a female painter, that is a rather unusual case in the history of arts (though more and more women worked as painters in the course of the 18th century), is invited to spend a few days in a Brittany castle to make the portrait of the daughter of an Italian-born countess. The portrait has a purpose: it will be send to a Milan-based young aristocrat who has promised to marry the girl, Héloïse. Actually, he should have married Héloïse’s elder sister but she would rather commit suicide than accept such a fate. Héloïse is also deeply hostile to her mother’s marriage plans and has made impossible for another painter to paint her. In such a highly sensitive context, Marianne is obliged to pretend being just a companion and to hide her work away.
Compelled to observe without gesture Marianne feels increasingly sympathetic to Héloïse’s torments and sulking character. Marianne eventually tells Héloïse the truth and shows her the painting she managed to make. The young woman right away dislikes it. Irked by Héloïse’s criticism, Marianne defaces the canvas, oddly repeating the gesture her predecessor made. That could have been the end of the story but out of the blue, and to the countess’ amazement, Héloïse decides to pose.
Already troubled by Héloïse’s strong personality, Marianne gets really upset when Héloïse challenges her point of view. Until her surprising decision Héloïse was above all a subject to be carefully scrutinized and handled, a distant, even untouchable object for Marianne’s trade, first appearing mysteriously in the shadow of a corridor and then viewed from the back, with her head covered by a hood, then a cold, awkward figure the painter is forced to play hide and seek with. Now she demands to be a person to be treated as an equal. When the sitter asks the painter to come close and to watch what she usually sees, she imposes her own judgment on the painter’s idiosyncratic gestures and character in response to the painter’s self-confident assessment of the sitter’s psychology. Marianne’s work may have become simpler to perform but ironically her position gets more complex and the way both women observe each other leads to a new kind of relation.
The absence of the countess, who is on a trip, and the bond they have with the other occupant of the castle, Sophie, the aristocrats’ maid and cook, who has struck up a good relationship with Marianne and is horrified to find out that she is pregnant, facilitate this change in the nature of the relation between Héloïse and Marianne. Discussions about love and the fight to find a way to prevent that unfortunate pregnancy from going on stir the fluid, troubled sentiments roiling now the heart of the two young women – till they accept to draw the natural, physical conclusions of their emotions.
Spontaneous, genuine, torrid, and intense, this love affair remains doomed. The countess’ return and the delivery of the long-awaited and now masterfully painted portrait bring the passion to an abrupt end. As they part ways, in an image standing as the exact opposite of the start of their relationship, Héloïse stands, dressed in a wonderful, delicate white dress in the face of the camera watching the door as it is closed by a fleeing Marianne, showing how deeply she has become, at least for a time, the conscious and satisfied creator and judge of her own heart and fate as much as an experienced, smart and skilled painter can be of her, or his, own world – although in this case, the painter has discovered deeper sentiments and truer passions than she thought possible in the first place.
That sentimental education, which injects an exhilarating, needed sense of freedom and sensuality, unfolds against the sober background of what women’s lives were during the era of the European Enlightenment. While men are debating about philosophy, science, and political affairs, changing the standards used to understand reality and to define mankind, women are left in an inferior position, set to bow to the rules of nature and society.
The list of their obvious grievances is long and shocking: young aristocrats bound by the conventions of matchmaking with no hope to challenge the choices made, young artists doomed to work at the fringe of the academies’ influence (as women of course cannot decently study the male anatomy, which means that they would never be able to paint in the expected rigorous and convincing way the male characters set to feature in the paintings bringing prestige and prizes, like mythological painting or paintings), girls who must please men’s definition of sex and desire, women who must deal with whatever their matrices hold (the pain of the periods or the unwanted fetus).
Héloïse’s rebellious streak is an acute awareness of this unequal status; she would not refrain from hobnobbing with her servant and Sophie’s experience would suggest to her another use for the art of Marianne – painting what women must suffer in their intimacy, a blunt, documentary look at the female experience that would be scandalous for her contemporaries (and still an embarrassment in the 20th century cinema and television). Her love, which is also essentially scandalous for the Church (especially as she used to live in a convent) and unusual at the time of libertinism (which has been obviously male-defined), is a willful act of pleasure and liberty asserting that women are as free as the men in the matters of the heart. Her story is truly, wonderfully, a “Portrait d’une jeune fille en feu” – “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”.
In a remarkable development, her adventures lead her to take part to a strange, secret meeting of women from seemingly various stripes of life one evening in the Brittany countryside. The pretext is the talk Sophie needs to have with a middle-aged woman handling undesired pregnancies; the outcome is a celebration of women’s solidarity and identity in the shadow of the society, the hint that despite conventions, challenges and constraints, women can still have a space of their own, free and fair (the point feels even more stronger when you realize that is one of the very few scenes of the film where a music is played, as if the soundtrack could only become relevant if it highlights a true feminine spirit). Appropriately, gracefully, this is the moment when the camera shows, through gazes, attitudes but also strikingly fantastic images, Héloïse and Marianne are fully in love with each other, ripe for a sensuous relationship, ready to go further in their conquest of liberty and happiness.