Céline Sciamma’s Portrait Of A Lady On Fire: Art, Desire And Love For Ideas

"People are excited by ideas. Cinema is about having desire for ideas and the fact that those ideas can create new desires, I think, is a beautiful dynamic." – Céline Sciamma

The phrase 'slow-burn' is usually used for thriller movies. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a slow-burn love story between two women, set in 17th century Brittany. Marianne is an artist commissioned to paint a marriage portrait of the sheltered and reticent, yet passionate, Héloïse.

The film explores desire as well as the artist at work: both curious subjects. Every scene with its subtle movements — a breath or a step, whether taken or withheld – crafts desire. The film is also an artistic collaboration with the audience. I trace the desires and ideas this film creates, a philosophical analysis of the film. For that is the film: desire and a love/play — I use those words interchangeably — of ideas, extending beyond the reels of cinema.

The poet's choice:

"Do all lovers feel like they are inventing something?"– Héloïse

Can you separate the artist from the lover? Poets have long relied on the moon for the creation of art. Numerous Bollywood songs around the theme are testimony. The moon symbolizes distance; the distance from the moon becomes the distance from the Beloved. The moon becomes the object of affection, and the artist falls in love with the moon, so to speak. The moon is also the artist's consort. Art emerges from this distance and space of love. Distance, creation, art and love have their alchemy in this film as well.

Sciamma weaves the myth of Orpheus into the film, mirroring its love and loss through the characters. In the myth of Eurydice, Orpheus ventures into the underworld to get his wife back from the dead. He is promised her return but for one condition: he must not turn around to look at her until they have stepped out of the underworld. It is not surprising to learn that impatient and doubtful, just as they are about to reach the threshold, Orpheus turns his head. Orpheus, in breaking his promise and looking back, loses his wife for the second time. One's obvious reaction is to think it is the most foolish thing to do. He was told not to look!
In one of the scenes, however, Marianne the artist explains her reading of the myth: that maybe he chose that. In choosing the memory of her, he makes the poet's or artist's choice, not the lover's. Maybe Orpheus was never meant to unite with Eurydice: turning back was fatal but also vital for his art. Orpheus goes on to remember his love through his music. His art emerges from the distance from his beloved.

"Don't regret, remember," says Marianne as she foresees losing her love, much before the inevitable ending of the film. We see Marianne too making the poet's choice. In both the film as well as Orpheus' story, we see that in loving, there is losing. But what they lose, they gain through art, by loving and desiring art.

The stage curtain:

The stage curtain might be one of the reasons there is a mystical or mysterious angle about it: what is behind it? The film tears through this mystery as well as the idea of a muse, which is central to the mythic creative, in exploring and depicting the creative process, through what is behind the scenes. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a study of the creative process; processes that are ordinarily unseen, hidden from the viewer. It takes Marianne more than one attempt to paint Héloïse's portrait. It is a meticulous, frustrating, yet rewarding process. One gets a glimpse of the layered processes of creating art as well as falling in love and the two lines are blurred. In an interview, Sciamma stresses patience, and how even as the director, she had to exercise much restraint: "You have to hold it back… it is a bit like love, you have to show it but also hold it…" Sciamma also talks of believing in delay and the pleasure of taking your time, not going too fast, all the way too soon; and how delay and frustration, as well as the uncertainty of it, is good tension, like a falling-in-love tension. This is seen in the way it takes more than half the film for the two lovers to warm up to each other.

In another conversation, Sciamma talks of the 'horizontal collaboration' between the characters, as opposed to vertical domination. The idea of the muse, disguised as something spiritual, unearthly and angelic, stems from this unequal domain of vertical domination. Héloïse picks up Marianne's brushes, playfully mixing the paints. We see her being inventive, in an intimate moment with Marianne, as her lover looks on. The gaze is reversed and Marianne becomes her canvas. She asks, "If you look at me, who do I look at?" turning the basic conventions of subject and object on their head.

In horizontal collaboration, there is friendship, camaraderie, and equality — where collaboration takes precedence rather than domination. Joy, love, friendship, creativity and invention stem from this space. While Marianne is seasoned in both love and art, Héloïse is an amateur. This doesn't stop them from collaborating in both art and love. The word amateur itself stems from the Latin root 'amare': to love.

Life and love within the portrait of our lives:

Héloïse's passionate nature is constrained and confined by society and its conventions. She is the portrait of a lady on fire. Her passion consumes her from within; she has a desire to feel and live life deeply. She is not one to hesitate to try something new – she lives life as much as she can. She loses Marianne, but through loving, she learns to love art (poet's choice) and in loving art and life, she learns to love. She shows that life is not somewhere far away, but right here, within the portrait of her life.

This way of being has something to offer us all, in this time of a pandemic.

You can find the film on Amazon Prime Video.