“Do all lovers feel like they’re making things up?” one woman asks another in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait de la jeune fille en feu. Love often entails the undignified task of trying to anchor one’s volatile inner feelings to an immutable public truth. For Sciamma’s characters this is even more difficult. As women, queer women, their voices are never received neutrally, but maligned, judged, then silenced. It is perhaps for this reason that Portrait de la jeune fille turns to art, where emotions do not always have to be verbally articulated or publicly avowed, and the quiet act of looking can say more than grand gestures ever might.
Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) has been recently called home to her isolated family home in an island in Britanny. She has an energy that tight-lipped patriarchs in 18th-century France might call ‘unbecoming’ – she runs around the grassy cliffs, jumps headfirst in the ocean, and openly resents her impending marriage, speculating as to what form freedom might take for a woman like her. When ambitious young artist Marianne (Noémie Merlant) arrives to paint Héloïse’s portrait, she realises that the task may not be an easy one. A late night conversation upon arrival with the family’s maid, the young Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), reveals that she’s not the first to come here. A previous painter, an unnamed man, left in a huff.
The film begins as a tale of intrigue. Héloïse’s mother, a kind but pragmatic Italian countess (Valeria Golino) gives Marianne a briefing. She is to paint the portrait in a week, which will then be presented to Héloïse’s potential husband, an unnamed Milanese gentleman. If he likes it, they will marry. Given Héloïse’s disdain for the former painter, Marianne must work on her portrait in secret and pretend to be Héloïse’s walking companion in the day. As they march along the windy cliffs, and hide out on the rocky beach below, Marianne secretly studies every inch of Héloïse. She looks at the way her face moves when she talks; how her hands fall when she sits down; how her lips twist when she’s embarrassed. Studious attention is often seen as a symptom of infatuation, even love; in Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, it can also pave a road to it.
The romantic tension between Héloïse and Marianne is built up so slowly and minutely that when they first kiss you are as relieved as you are delighted. Sciamma uses intimate close-ups and shots that play with the act of looking to portray their love affair, and seems to imply that attention can be extractive as it is flattering – it depends on who is looking. A smooth, conventional pan down Héloïse’s body, naked in bed, is suddenly disrupted by a small mirror placed over her groin. With this, the classical feminine nude looks back. When Héloïse inevitably discovers Marianne’s true purpose at her house, and after a tense emotional exchange, she offers to properly sit for her portrait. Later, the couple tease each other by asking who out of the two is more observant – the artist Marianne with her keen eye, scanning Héloïse’s features in order to commit them to canvas, or Héloïse, the artist’s subject, who is looking at Marianne looking at her? Their dialogue reminds us of our own status as third party spectators looking at them. This flirtation between the couple, that gives and withholds at once, is also perhaps a larger response to the unrelenting voyeurism of other cinematic renditions of lesbian relationships, and the passive, consumptive spectatorship they invite. Portrait de la jeune fille en feu is interested in eros in its less obvious forms – the way it emerges in the most seemingly mundane of encounters, or how obsessive love can be sparked by the way someone curls their mouth.
When Marianne shows Héloïse her first portrait – a rosy, flattering, if somewhat charmless endeavour – they argue about what’s more important: adhering to the formal rules of portraiture, or pursuing more malleable notions of capturing spirit and playing with feeling. Portrait de la jeune fille en feu – a study of two women pursuing lives larger than the ones they’ve been given – chooses the spirit over formalism; poetry over realism; myth over history. One evening, Sophie, Marianne and Héloïse gather around the dimly lit kitchen table for a communal reading on the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus, legendary Greek lovers who perish while escaping the underworld after Orpheus defies Hade’s order and looks back at his lover. The reading sparks a lively debate about the responsibilities of romantic love. There is at first broad consensus against the indefensibility of Orpheus’s actions – who would so foolishly implode such a relationship? Then someone interjects with an alternative idea. Perhaps Orpheus was practising the romance of a poet rather than that of a lover; one that preferred to preserve the incorruptibility of a beautiful thing by locking it in time. It is an unsubtle but forceful articulation of Sciamma’s own mediation on poetic love. When Marianne looks at Héloïse, she does not only survey her appearance, but also creates her own myths about who she is and who they are, trying to etch into her memory the image of her lover as she is at that moment. Not all this can be captured by the tidy parameters of a portrait, but the closeted 18th-century lesbian must use the tools she’s got.
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