‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ Is a Horny Triumph of the Female Gaze

The first time I meet Celine Sciamma, she’s standing on a dirty London pavement outside an 18th-century hotel, cigarette resting gently between her fingers. “Meet” is perhaps not the right word – in the sense that Sciamma doesn’t know who I am at this point – so we don’t “meet” so much as “pass each other”. But I recognise her instantly, with her straight brown bob and pant suit. It’s a weird place, admittedly, to first spot an award-winning film director and writer – next to the piss-stained cobbles and rubbish of Soho – but it seems strangely fitting for an artist so brilliant at depictions of naturalism.

I’ve come to the hotel to discuss Sciamma’s new film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is about as far away from the concept of piss-stained as you can get. Set in 1770 Brittany, and recipient of the best screenplay award at Cannes last year, it follows the story of an artist named Marianne (played by Noémie Merlant), who is commissioned to paint a young woman, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). Héloïse, however, is protesting her potential future marriage to a man in Milan by refusing to sit for a portrait. Marianne must then paint Héloïse secretly, pretending to be her companion and observing her along the way so she can later return to her room and sketch from memory. Their relationship develops, but not without an undercurrent of tension (or perhaps, gothic horror: you might ask yourself what fire the title suggests, or what exactly the eery soundtrack evokes). It’s Sciamma’s first feature since 2014's Girlhood, which was a gritty yet beautiful social realist portrayal of girls growing up in the Parisian suburb, and the first departure from her coming-of-age trilogy that also includes Water Lilies (2007) and Tomboy (2011).

Compared to this trio of films, Portrait of a Lady on Fire seems like a departure. Or is it? Across a round, mahogany table, I tell Sciamma I am conflicted. On the one hand Portrait of Lady on Fire feels like a totally new style for the director, and on the other, it maintains a characteristic naturalism and arresting visual identity that ties it to her previous work. Does she consider it a 'different' film?

“No,” she tells me somewhat uncertainly, weighing up my points. “I feel the same paradox or balance that you are describing. It was a departure in the fact that it's grown women, and not a coming-of-age story, and also that it's working with professional actresses, and the period piece thing. But I find [the period genre] more an accessory.”

Sciamma wasn’t so much enticed by the period drama form. She felt more intrigued by the ability to focus in on the subject of the invisible, 18th-century woman artist. “They were so numerous at the time, and I was not aware of this (as with everybody, I guess)”, she explains, gesticulating. "I still felt quite shocked that actually, I'd never heard of the fact that there was such a rich artistic scene at the time.”

Alongside this spotlight on a forgotten industry, she says she also felt a desire to depict the complexities of love, injecting nuance into a well-worn subject.

“The first spark was to write a love story and write a movie about how love is born,” Sciamma says. In a room filled with historic paintings, she unpicks her own concept. “It was also looking at how love is falling in love with the brain of somebody and all the intellectual relationship, and how love is creating something together – a language and a piece of art.”

But this isn’t your conventional telling of the world’s most overdone theme. From its lesbian love story, to the fact that behind the scenes, the director and leading actor were fresh off a breakup of their long-term relationship, the film depicts a type of love that isn’t conventional, possessive or heteronormative. Sciamma emphasises that, “It's about love as an emancipation. Our imagination should depart from the fact that the success of a love story is spending your whole fucking life together. We have another political programme for love. For example, lesbians, they are friends with their exes. You can have a different life. Why do we want to fit into those ‘happy endings,’ that are more propaganda for a lifestyle? We can depart from that. We are more free.”

This purposeful reimagining of a love story and a genre piece is what makes Portrait of a Lady on Fire so impressive, and a novelty that Sciamma sought out: “I knew I wanted it to be new, to have new images, new rhythm, new feeling, but I always want it to be new, so it wasn't particularly about the period drama,” says Sciamma. “I wanted to create the language and the grammar of the film, and do not want to belong. I do not want to belong to cinema history,” she jokes. “I am a woman – I know I'm doomed anyway.”

And so Sciamma creates that novelty through an unsubtle play with the female gaze. Marianne studies Héloïse, with the camera often taking up her POV. When Héloïse is being painted, she gazes back at Marianne. Then there’s the real female gaze in the form of a woman director and cinematographer, which no doubt contributes to Sciamma describing it to me as a "playful film". Sciamma leans in with excitement as she tells me how much she wanted the audience to grapple with these depictions of power.

“We're climaxing from that!” she laughs. “It's fun – these multiple layers are fun to think about. I'm hoping that half of the pleasure of the audience is getting into this mental layers and picking the tongue of the film and the language of the film as it grows, and getting into the pace.”

That playfulness around perspective – from Héloïse to Marianne to Sciamma's views – taps into a wider political conversation around female gaze in lesbian stories: who should shoot them, and who are they for? Blue is the Warmest Colour prompted a heavy scrutiny around this question back in 2013. Then, Julie Maroh, author of the graphic novel that the film was based on, took issue with the sex scenes, describing the "brutal and surgical display of so-called lesbian sex" as ridiculous, while Manohla Dargis of the New York Times criticised the gaze of the film for over-sexualising the two protagonists (the piece was was literally titled “Seeing You Seeing Me”).

This debate was reignited at Cannes last year, when Portrait of a Lady on Fire was up against Blue Is the Warmest Colour director, Abdellatif Kechiche’s newest film, also criticised for its overt focus on women’s bums. Sciamma later defended the Kechiche's film, arguing that the two viewpoints should not be in such direct opposition.

How political does she find Portrait of a Lady on Fire, then. We're coming to the end of our time together, and I want to know. “Of course, every movie is political, some people just deny it because they like the world the way it is,” she tells me, matter-of-factly. “The movie is like a manifesto for the female gaze and I'm really happy with that… Of course!”

"I want to do the most feminist, radical film,” she says, and it must be time for another cigarette. “If I succeed maybe it can be the manifesto of that.”

'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' is out on wider release in UK cinemas on Friday the 28th of February.

@rubyJLL