Portrait of a Lady on Fire

 Celina Sciamma's  Portrait of a Young Woman on Fire (released in English as Portrait of a Lady on Fire) is a laborious and politically correct.feminist parable.  It's highly regarded due to its exemplary content and has been honored with the full Criterion treatment.  Unfortunately, it's not a very good movie.  It gets an A for good intentions but never persuades the viewer that it has any substance beyond it's rather tendentious deconstruction of the "male gaze" in art (and cinema) by providing a counter-example of "female gaze."  The problem, of course, is that the optical equipment is the same and, at least in the context of art, gazes aren't really gendered -- if the film wants to show that the "female gaze" of the artist is different from the "male gaze", it isn't successful.  The movie makes some interesting points but they don't add up to much more than an occasion for some soft-core and tastefully shot Lesbian sex scenes.  Although the movie proposes to be in dialogue with Jacques Rivette's gargantuan La Belle Noiseuse and Balzac's "The Unknown Masterpiece", both exercises in showing that the artist's gaze is potentially lethal to both it's object and itself, the picture reminds me more of an extended (and unfunny) version of Guy Maddin's sublime Sissy Boy Slap Party. 

The picture is told as a flashback.  A group of earnest young women art-students are sketching their teacher in charcoal.  The model, the art teacher Marianne, talks back to those who are drawing her, the first evidence in the film that the dominance of the artist over the model will be challenged in this narrative.  One of the students has brought from "stock" -- I'm quoting the subtitles which are atrocious -- a surrealist painting by the teacher showing a moonlit and stormy ocean and a woman with fire burning at the bottom of her dress.  This picture summons to mind the extended flashback that comprises most of the film's two-hour running time.  The narrative is a fable.  The female artist we have met teaching in her atelier is conveyed to an island where it is her assignment to paint a young woman's portrait but without the subject knowing this.  (The painting which is a "commodity" represents the young woman's subjugation to her betrothed, apparently some kind of aristocrat in Milan -- the film seems to be set just before the French Revolution.)   The heroine, Heloise, replaces her sister in this endeavor -- the sister, whom we never see, apparently killed herself rather than be married to the aristocrat and her portrait was never finished:  the face is blotted out.)  For the first half of the film, the artist, Marianne, surreptitiously sketches Heloise and works on her portrait, but without success.  The two women embark on a love affair and Heloise now consents to pose for the portrait which will be deadly to their relationship -- once the picture is done, the portrait will be carted away to the aristocrat and this will, somehow, represent Heloise being joined to him in marriage, that is, as his property like the painted image.  There's a subplot involving a maid Sophie who is mysteriously pregnant -- this is odd since there are no men around, but, maybe, she is with child by parthenogenesis.  The two women with Sophie try to abort the child unsuccessfully and, so, they have recourse to a local midwife (or someone on that order) who pries the fetus out of her while poor Sophie screams:  she's lying on a bed with her knees up with a little baby cooing in her face.  Marianne wants to turn away from the spectacle but Heloise orders her to look and, later, she even makes a drawing of Sophie's ordeal.  The portrait is completed and, therefore, the tender and romantic love affair must end.  There's a coda that shows the two women pining over their lost love a few years later -- Heloise is now married, although her husband remains invisible, and has a child.  During their love affair, Marianne played the opening of one of Vivaldi's Four Seasons to Heloise on a spinet.  Heloise attends a concert in Milan in which this music is played and bursts into nostalgic tears while Marianne watches her across the opera hall, unseen by her former lover.  (The close-up of the distressed Heloise goes on and on and on and it's a tasteless display, vulgar in its obviousness.)

The film dutifully crosses all "tees" and dots all "i's."  Sophie is a skilled embroiderer and the film insists on the aesthetic equivalence between "women's work" in textiles and Marianne's painting.  Marianne says that she's not allowed to paint male nudes from nature.  This is not from some kind of 18th century prudishness but to debar her from using heroic male figures in history paintings -- that is, to keep her from competing with men in that prestigious genre.  When Marianne tells Heloise that she has noticed some of her quirks, the model, Heloise, turns these observations back at her and identifies quirks in the artist of which she has become aware.  (That is, the subject of art is not silenced but allowed or empowered to talk back to the one representing her.)  Heloise's mother is complicit with the patriarchy -- she was also "sold" as a portrait to her husband and insists that her daughter follow this fate.  The male gaze as deadly is portrayed in the story of Eurydice and Orpheus -- when a man transfixes you with his gaze, you are sent back to the kingdom of death.  Marianne has painted a canvas showing Orpheus' gaze blasting Eurydice back into Hades.  She exhibits this picture (under her father's name -- he's apparently also an artist) and talks to little pedantic homunculus in a gallery hall crowded with men (with the exception of a courier and the crew that rows Marianne to the island these are the only men in the film -- and the homunculus is the only guy who gets to talk.)  When Marianne's canvases in a wooden box fall overboard from the boat on which she is rowed to the island, she leaps into the sea and clutches them like a life-raft, thus dramatizing the importance of art in her life. When we first see Heloise, she's dressed in the clothes from her Benedictine convent and she runs full-tilt for the cliffs -- oh no!we think, she's about to plunge off the rocks like her poor sister.  But she tells Marianne, after pulling up short at the edge of the cliff, that she just likes the feeling of running.  On the island, there are no men whatsoever, just women who gather in a coven around a bonfire (this is where Heloise accidentally gets set on fire) and sing in a close harmony, performing some kind of keening 18th century rap music.  Sisterhood is powerful, but, in the end, the invisible patriarchy destroys the love affair between the women and they are left only with their memories.  

The movie is caught between realism and fable and ends up unsuccessful on both counts:  it's not sufficiently stylized to work as a fable and insufficiently plausible to be adequate as realism.  The island has no men and the massive castle-like structure in which the action is set has no exterior:  apparently, Sciamma construes establishing shots as proprietary and, therefore, patriarchal and she doesn't use them in the film.  (This results in the odd feature that the doughty lads rowing the boat ashore just  drop Marianne off on the cobble strand without even telling her how to get to the castle -- "it's up there in the trees," someone vaguely says.)  The castle is mostly bare inside and has a weird unlived-in quality, doubtlessly intentional but rather puzzling.  The paintings don't look anything like 18th century art -- they have the patina of glib, 20th century society portraiture and the surrealist image of the woman on fire on the beach looks like it could have been painted by Max Ernst or Leonora Carrington.  The characters are obviously emblematic:  Sophie looks like a serving girl out of a Chardin painting and has no character other than being unhappily pregnant.  The sorority between the three women (which includes the serving girl) is implausible.  In Sissy Boy Slap Party, set also on some exotic island, a rugged old geezer tells a dozen or so boys, all of them obviously gay, that he doesn't want them to be "slapping each other" while he's away in town (buying condoms as it happens).  Of course, the boy's can't resist a slap party.  It's the same thing here:  mom says to the two young women that they should work conscientiously to complete the task of the painting -- but the girls get up to all sorts of mischief in her absence.  Nonetheless, she returns and restores order.  "Boys, boys, boys!" the geezer says in Maddin's film, "I told you not to be slapping one another."