Pride Month 2020: Portrait of a Lady On Fire (6/30/2020)

If I had to name a favorite lesbian film, right now it would be Portrait of a Lady On Fire. It's not particularly happy, but it transcends the problematic tragic lesbian trope to provide a powerful statement on both art and women's solidarity, and provides an emotionally engaging and utterly hypnotic experience to boot. My second viewing for Pride Month, now that the excellently mastered Criterion Collection Blu-Ray has been released, has only deepened my respect for it.

Director Céline Sciamma has called Portrait of a Lady On Fire a "manifesto on the female gaze." The idea of the gaze is extremely important in Portrait, in terms of who is gazing, what they are gazing upon, and how their gaze illuminates the subject. The male gaze is ever present in Portrait, but not in the way that one would expect; the camerawork and writing itself is utterly devoid of it, but the effects of patriarchy are well present. This is a time where women have almost no choice in deciding the course their lives will take. Héloïse and her mother are both wealthy women who are forced into marriages and lives they never chose for themselves by men. Héloïse attempts to rebel against this fate, but her efforts only ever serve to delay the inevitable. Marianne, on the other hand, seems to have quite a lot of freedom on the surface, being a single artist who is set to inherit her father's business. However, even she is restricted by unfair rules and regulations put into place to keep her from producing art greater than that of her male compatriots, and is forced to internalize the male gaze in her paintings.

Together, these two women discover their own identities as women, and even though they are caught up in the flow of the objectivizing desires of men, carried by a fate created for them by patriarchy which they cannot escape, they help each other to preserve their own internal strengths and autonomy. In Portrait, Sciamma creates a world where women, when left to their own devices, free from the gaze of men, come together and put their shared struggles and experiences as women over the superficial class boundaries that divide them. Though the effects of patriarchy are ever present, it is clear that the strength of women does not come from men, but rather from the bonds that they forge with each other, and from their own internal strength that they can only find on their own terms.

Though their time together was short, it is clear that Marianne and Héloïse will never forget each other, and while they will always be haunted by the love that could have been, they are all the stronger for having experienced what little of it they could. Their memories will always be preserved in the images they posses of each other, of the art that they created together, and in the memories conjured by music and painting. And in this memory, Marianne finds her autonomy as a painter, daring to defy tradition as a woman to create truly great work of the female, rather than male, gaze, and Héloïse finds a way to wield her anger and loneliness brought about by her fate as a source of personal strength; never truly relenting to the forces of men even as she is pushed about. And while they are apart, never to see each other again, their memories of each other will always be precious.

Portrait of a Lady On Fire is, in my eyes the first great art film of the decade, and is rich in content for analysis from multiple angles. Beyond what I've discussed today, one could just as easily view it as a philosophical statement on art, a philosophical statement on love and memory, or just a richly intimate romance story. Even on a purely formal level does it succeed, with an impeccable sense of craft and personal style brought to every level of production. But perhaps its most important statement is its exploration - through a queer lens - of the ways in which women can hold each other up in the face of male oppression, and become each other's strength.