We watch as they try to hint at their intentions, to make small gestures of vulnerability in order to gauge any microreaction on the part of the other. They feel compelled to know each other’s body. Still, they feel compelled to give voice to who they are. Surely they would know that their desires are profoundly shameful and immoral, and to state these feelings out loud would be a risk unlike any other. They only have the glances and gazes that linger and flit around each other as they try to find ways of giving expression to what they are feeling. It may be that all lovers are inventing something together, but Marianne and Héloïse are inventing more than most, for they are two women with no language to describe their attraction. It may be that all lovers are inventing something together, but Marianne and Héloïse are inventing more than most.

But she was taken from that refuge and called to serve the economic needs of her family when her older sister made the ultimate refusal-preferring suicide to arranged marriage.

Prior to that she had made an even larger refusal, turning away from the world for the isolation of a convent. She has steadfastly refused to let any of the other painters preceding Marianne paint her. In her lifetime, Héloïse has only managed to make her will known by frustrating the designs that others have for her life. Marianne has been brought all this way to surreptitiously forge Héloïse’s portrait. It is the late eighteenth century, and the artist Marianne is rowed across turbulent waters to be left on a rugged, windswept French island off the coast of Brittany, where she encounters the innocent Héloïse. Céline Sciamma) elegantly lays out in its first third.

That, essentially, is the predicament that Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, dir. And-she is so very overpoweringly desirable.Įxcept, this woman’s job is to secretly paint a portrait of her so that she can be shipped off to Milan and married to a man. She might validate her on the deepest and most intimate levels. This other person opens up the possibility that her identity might be expressible to another human being. She would feel fundamentally unresolved and out of place, as though she were a discordant note amid a well-tended classical symphony.Īnd now imagine that she meets another woman, and this lady makes her begin to suspect that she is not alone. This woman would have no language for the attraction she feels she would have no way to explain her identity to herself she would have no community to combat the overpowering feelings of confusion, isolation, and estrangement inherent to such a situation. What to make of the arrival of an LGBT period drama from the time of Louis XV into the twenty-first century? Very much, as Veronica Esposito writes in her consideration of this French historical romantic drama.Ĭonsider the predicament of the young lesbian coming of age in a society that doesn’t know LGBT people exist. Still from Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Lilies Films / Arte / Hold Up Films, 2019)

Portrait of a lady on fire