Review by Jessica Carr, Zach Dennis, and Andrew Swafford
Jessica: Sciamma's latest film plunges us into the depths of passion! We follow a painter in 1770 that is commissioned by a French countess to secretly paint her daughter's wedding portrait. The two begin to spend more and more time together as the painter studies her so she can capture her essence in the painting. Then, boom! They fall in love! There is literal fire here, people. 🔥
But seriously, I absolutely loved this film. The attraction between the two female leads has such a nice build to it, and I was emotionally invested from the very beginning. How about you, Zach?
Zach: I love the flow of this film. The scenery and the ambiance feels like something mysterious and beautiful. It kind of leads you into its world without completely bringing you in – if that makes sense.
As the gradual attraction between the two characters mounts and the serenity of the entire experience begins to wash over you, it really goes into another gear. There is the scene halfway through where Marianne and Héloïse are at this bonfire gathering that just lifts you out of this very simple story structure and implants you into a heightened odyssey of passion.
Andrew, what did you lock into with this film?
Andrew: For me, the experience of Portrait of a Lady on Fire was deeply enhanced by sound. There’s no score whatsoever in this film (only about three crucial instances of diegetic music), and the dialogue is as quiet as it is sparse, which opens up so much space in the mix to hear sounds that you normally wouldn’t.
Like Jessica alluded to, one of the most prominent sounds is literal fire – the film is set at time before electricity, so every scene is lit either by flickering candles or a crackling fireplace. The manor where the romance takes place is also on a cliffside, so you’re often hearing crashing waves and roaring wind coming from far offscreen. There are also even smaller sounds: the shuffling of shoes on hardwood floors, the coarse hairs of a well-used paintbrush scraping across a fresh canvas, and, perhaps most importantly, the sound of barely concealed, sharp intakes of breath when one of the lovers is struck by the other’s beauty or presence. Céline Sciamma has always been a director who is great at getting her actors to communicate nonverbally, but with Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the whole world of the film is communicating the sexual tension that exists between these two women with its constantly ASMR-inducing soundscape.
I think it’s very possible that queer audiences who have been starved for high-quality romance films like this might want more from the film visually – I feel like I should warn people that the film almost feels censored in the way it cuts away right before the relationship escalates from romantic to sexual – but I thought the film was so impressive in the way it used sound to give its audience a heightened sensory experience.