The Upcoming
  • Culture
    • Art
    • Cinema
      • Movie reviews
      • Film festivals
    • Food & Drinks
      • News & Features
      • Restaurant & bar reviews
      • Interviews & Recipes
    • Literature
    • Music
      • Live music
    • Theatre
    • Shows & On demand
  • Fashion & Lifestyle
    • Accessories
    • Beauty
    • News & Features
    • Shopping & Trends
    • Tips & How-tos
    • Fashion weeks
  • What’s On
    • Art exhibitions
    • Theatre shows
  • Tickets
  • Join us
    • Editorial unit
    • Our writers
    • Join the team
    • Join the mailing list
    • Support us
    • Contact us
  • Interviews
  • Competitions
  • Special events
    • Film festivals
      • Berlin
      • Tribeca
      • Sundance London
      • Cannes
      • Locarno
      • Venice
      • London
      • Toronto
    • Fashion weeks
      • London Fashion Week
      • New York Fashion Week
      • Milan Fashion Week
      • Paris Fashion Week
      • Haute Couture
      • London Fashion Week Men’s
  • Facebook

  • Twitter

  • Instagram

  • YouTube

  • RSS

Cannes Film Festival 2019

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu)

Cannes Film Festival 2019: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) | Review
3 May 2019
Joseph Owen
Avatar
Joseph Owen
3 May 2019

Movie and show review

Joseph Owen

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu)

★★★★★

Special event

This extraordinary film builds upon John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and Walter Benjamin’s theory of art, transforming the male abstract – ideas of gaze and reproduction – into the female concrete. Furniture, clothes, bodies and relationships are deliberate placements, mannered and stylised, the backdrop on which women suffer and prosper in 18th-century France, in a quiet palatial home containing a snare of secrecy, an obstinacy, a difficulty. What a riveting, gorgeous illustration of how the eye works and how it doesn’t, how it at once focuses and distorts perception.

The conventional oil painting is pristine and exact, referential and symbolic. It contends directly with its subject and with itself – as an object within the frame of beauty, art and aesthetics. Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire likewise contends with its subject, painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant), and her subject, aristocratic bride-to-be Héloïse (Adele Haenel), producing a doubling and redoubling of form and composition. Multiple perspectives obey a single authority split into fragments: Sciamma as director; Marianne as artist; Héloïse as sitter, autonomous, elusive, willing to stare back.

This sounds like an exhausting academic exercise but Sciamma renders at its centre a forlorn, bristling romance, one essentially defined by brushstroke and facture. To handle paint is to handle the body. To turn away is to forgo vision, to reject understanding of the interior being. Ways of looking and seeing establish Marianne and Héloïse’s interactions, these purposeful and controlled until accident: a splatter, an omission, a flame that licks the fabric.

The power relations between the four women – Marianne, Héloïse, Sophie the maid (Luàna Bajrami) and the Countess (Valeria Golino) – must be essentially amorphous. Norms and etiquette constitute a shifting plane on which polite expectations wilt under transgressions. Marianne paints as she likes; Héloïse hides her body and resists observation; Sophie eats at the table; the Countess takes an extended absence.

Dorothée Guiraud’s costume design provides the crucial link between material and psychology: the translucent veil that reveals the mouth, the stark greens and reds, the white dress and the black corset. Away from the house, beach and coast act as exceptional spaces that soothe repressions, that allow Marianne and Héloïse to be indulgent, poetic, romantic.

Male influence exists everywhere but any direct imposition – the sight of a man, the visual anticipation of marriage – offers a distinct obscenity, an unaccountable rupture. So painter and sitter must cling to fleeting moments, to discussions of Orpheus and Eurydice, to fitful glances at the piano, to page numbers in a book.

Scenes at an art gallery and opera house exhilarate. These are neither summaries nor appendices but vital components. They present two truths with mitigation: a conventional portrait with a smuggled indiscretion and a conventional life with the memory of escape. What appears to be perfect unity produces anomalies, and in doing so creates a masterpiece.

★★★★★

Joseph Owen

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival 2019 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.

Watch some clips from Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) here:

Related Itemsfeaturedreview

More in Cannes

The Traitor (Il traditore)

★★★★★
Joseph Owen
Read More

The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily (La fameuse invasion des ours en Sicile)

★★★★★
Joseph Owen
Read More

Adam

★★★★★
Joseph Owen
Read More

Frankie

★★★★★
Joseph Owen
Read More

Cannes 2019: Awards, predictions and highlights from the festival

The editorial unit
Read More

Sibyl

★★★★★
Sam Gray
Read More

“We’ve had to face some interesting moments of prejudice”: Bacurau directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles discuss their mysterious Western at Cannes 2019

Sam Gray
Read More

“If I play a smaller role, nobody will ever forget it”: Bacurau star Udo Kier recounts his long and varied career at Cannes 2019

Sam Gray
Read More

To Live to Sing (Huo Zhe Chang Zhe)

★★★★★
Mary-Catherine Harvey
Read More
Scroll for more
Tap

Movie and show review

Joseph Owen

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu)

★★★★★

Special event

  • Popular

  • Latest

  • TOP PICKS

  • Outside the Wire
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • You Me at Six – Suckapunch
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • The Queen’s Gambit: A chess story that’s not about the moves but the motives
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • An interview with Ifrah Ismael: Tales from the Front Line and other stories
    Theatre
  • Sleaford Mods – Spare Ribs
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • Female filmmakers lead nominees for the London Critics’ Circle Film Awards
    Cinema
  • Persian Lessons: Exclusive new clip
    Cinema
  • Jeremiah Fraites: Piano Piano
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • Quo Vadis, Aida?
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Lonely the Brave – The Hope List
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • WandaVision: Marvel’s charming sitcom proves an astounding success
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • The Queen’s Gambit: A chess story that’s not about the moves but the motives
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Undercover at Morpheus Show Online
    ★★★★★
    Theatre
  • Ten short literary collections to get you back into reading
    Literature
  • Mayor
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
The Upcoming
Pages
  • Contact us
  • Join mailing list
  • Join us
  • Our London food map
  • Our writers
  • Support us
  • What, when, why

Copyright © 2011-2020 FL Media

Glasgow Film Festival 2019: Dirty God | Review
Cannes jury president Iñárritu smooths over Netflix debate, emphasises diversity at inaugural press conferenc