Review: Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire on Criterion Blu-ray

With its precisely lit interiors, sweeping landscapes, and penetrating close-ups, this is a film in which every pixel truly matters.

Portrait of a Lady on FireWriter-director Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a taxonomy of gazes that’s also, for better and worse, a discourse on them. This sweeping portrayal of doomed romance doomed to brevity ponders how to memorialize an image, as well as how to keep it eternally alive. Assertive in its belief that committing to a moment is the only way to consecrate it to memory, the film is ingeniously structured around a painting that begets tragedy.

Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is a young painter who’s hired to spend a week on an estate on a rocky island off the French coast of Brittany in order to create a portrait of Héloïse (Adéle Haenel), who’s set to be wed to a wealthy man in Milan. The artist arrives at the house soaking wet, having rescued her blank canvases from a roiling sea. She’s housed in a reception room full of covered furnishings, and is warned by Héloïse’s mother (Valeria Golino), an Italian countess, that she’s been brought here under false pretenses.

Héloïse enters the film cloaked in darkness, hidden from view until a guest of wind blows the hood off her coat off and she turns her head back to gaze at Marianne. Sciamma adds further gothic trappings in her lengthy introduction of Héloïse, who refuses to sit for her portrait, thus forcing Marianne to paint her from memory. Moreover, Héloïse is days away from having been removed from a convent after the death of her older sister. Marianne is meant to befriend her, protect her from her grief or any destructive impulses, and simultaneously study her in order to complete the portrait that, if it pleases her Milanese suitor, will cement Héloïse’s marriage.

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Héloïse and Marianne’s gazes frequently intersect in the film. Marianne and Héloïse are most often filmed from the shoulders up, centered in the frame. Their glances toward one another are also looks straight into the camera. Claire Mathon’s cinematography establishes Héloïse as a madeline; her looks are furtive but indelible. It’s clear that Marianne is drawn to her, but Sciamma amplifies the drama of their courtship by setting Héloïse up as a flight risk, always prone to potentially hurl herself into the surf or off the untamed cliffs of the French coast.

This characterization is at odds with the equanimous relationship that ensues between the two twentysomething women, who navigate the class and gender constraints of society in the latter half of the 18th century. Marianne is a cosmopolitan student of her craft, bound by rules established by a string of male masters. By contrast, Héloïse’s life is more tightly controlled. For one, she loves music but has never heard an orchestra—the film, with two extraordinary exceptions, is devoid of a musical score, relying on the snap of firewood and crush of ocean waves for sonic atmosphere—and her commitment to a life of celibacy and solitude has, without her consent, become a life bound to partnership with a stranger. What the two share is passion and curiosity, and they explore and interrogate one another’s preconceptions.

The film is right to be obsessed with the faces of its two leads. Merlant’s expressions have a rare immediacy, as she seems to digest sights and thoughts with alacrity, while Haenel reveals herself more carefully, never making her intentions or impressions known until she’s ready to. Seated across a room at the height of their passion, Héloïse makes clear to Marianne that she’s no mere subject, but also a woman gleaning information from the person she’s staring at.

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Sciamma isn’t out to question the gaze, but to point out that one is always met by another, and what’s most stirring about her film is the lack of artifice in Héloïse and Marianne’s feelings for one another. They’re uninterested in control or power, both searching for a sense of truth amid the artificial, patriarchal strictures they exist in. The film frustrates when it feels compelled to elucidate those struggles in words, or through a hokey flashback structure (that, it should be said, yields to an ecstatic final shot). Sciamma’s script has more than a handful of dazzling turns of phrase, but it’s also unnecessarily keen to give some present-day relevance to a romance that’s assuredly timeless. Where her previous films (Girlhood, Tomboy) have excelled in situating their protagonists in complex, sometimes hostile societies, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is at its most beguiling and probing when the rest of the world feels far away.

Image/Sound

With its precisely lit interiors, sweeping landscapes, and penetrating close-ups, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a film in which every pixel truly matters. Shot in 8K on location in Brittany and in a decrepit 18th-century palace, its images are at once painterly and unapologetically digital, using the almost hyperreal capabilities of its ultra-HD format to imbue a quietly scintillating romance with a wildly expressive inner glow. Criterion has maxed out the bitrate on its Blu-ray to preserve as much of the detail in the meticulously composed frames as possible. From the myriad blues of the sea to the deep emerald of Héloïse’s dress to the warm yellow glow of candlelit interiors, the disc maintains such a stunningly high level of resolution, one might easily mistake it for a UHD release. The film’s spare yet haunting sound design is also beautifully preserved by Criterion, which has remastered the original DTS-HD Master 5.1 surround track, balancing the hushed intensity of the dialogue with the fervent grandeur of Vivaldi’s “Summer” concerto during the poignant final shot.

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Extras

The supplementary materials on this disc feel slightly perfunctory but nonetheless offer an illuminating peek into Céline Sciamma’s very personal yet highly collective artistic process. In an enlightening 30-minute interview with film critic Dana Stevens, the director speaks at length about Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s production and pre-production, centering the roles of her various collaborators. She reveals, for example, that one of her earliest “casting” decisions was hiring artist Hélène Delmaire to create the portraits that would play such a central role in the film’s narrative. A contemporary artist rather than a mere reproductionist, Delmaire was discovered by Sciamma on Instagram, and, as Delmaire discusses in her own interview segment, it’s her hands we see in the film applying paint to canvas.

In a feature interview with Adéle Haenel and Noémie Merlant, the actors discuss Sciamma’s egalitarian approach to creativity, and Merlant talks about her time spent studying Delmaire to inform her performance. A segment with Mathon filmed at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival goes deep into the film’s complicated cinematographic processes, which involved a difficult choice between shooting on 35mm or digital and the complex gaffing set-ups that allowed Mathon to achieve such intense, light-suffused close-ups even in dim interiors.

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While the extras are uniformly informational, only critic Ela Bittencourt’s essay matches the simmering intensity of the film itself, sussing out the film’s intricate interweaving of love story, period detail, and feminist politics while not losing sight of the passionate intensity at its core. However, it’s hard not to wish there was a commentary track here, particularly considering Sciamma has already recorded one for the film’s French home video release.

Overall

The utterly impeccable audio-visual quality of Criterion’s Blu-ray release aren’t quite matched by the disc’s run-of-the-mill offering of extras.

Score: 
 Cast: Noémie Merlant, Adéle Haenel, Luàna Bajrami, Valeria Golino  Director: Céline Sciamma  Screenwriter: Céline Sciamma  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 121 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019  Release Date: June 23, 2020  Buy: Video

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