Portrait of a lady on fire movie#
There are hardly any men in the movie at all, and, when they do appear, they often have their backs turned or their faces out of focus when we finally do see a man’s face clearly, it feels like an intrusion. Sciamma-who has directed five films in France since 2008-has called “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” a “manifesto about the female gaze,” and it’s true that at every turn her film subverts the male perspective in favor of feminine ways of looking. “We are going to paint,” she tells Marianne, who grabs her oils and a small sliver of spare canvas. Does Sophie feel well enough to get out of bed? Héloïse drags the mattress the women had been resting on to the ground, tells Sophie to lie down upon it, then positions herself in the same stance that Sophie’s abortionist had assumed hours before, reënacting the procedure. The third, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), is the house’s young maid, who is recuperating from an abortion that she received, at the home of a local herbalist, earlier that morning.
Another, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), is the Parisian artist hired to paint Héloïse’s portrait, who has also become her lover. One of them, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), is the sheltered but willful daughter of the house, betrothed to a wealthy Italian courtier whom she has no desire to marry. début was one of the strongest of any French film since “Amelie.”) In the aforementioned scene, three women lounge together on a bed inside a drafty country estate, their faces warmed by a crackling fireplace. (It shares a distributor with “ Parasite,” and has attracted similar levels of buzz according to Deadline, its U.S. After premièring last May, at Cannes, where it won Best Screenplay and the Queer Palm, it was released wide in the United States in February. This line made an impression on the French filmmaker Céline Sciamma, who cited it recently as the inspiration for one of the most striking scenes in her new film, “ Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” The movie is a lesbian love story, set on a remote shore in Brittany, in the eighteenth century. “I do not believe there exists a ‘Workshop of the Backstreet Abortionist’ in any museum in the world,” she writes.
In it, she mourns the lack of great works of art that affirm or even depict her experience. But “L’événement,” in which she tells the story of an illegal abortion she had in 1963, at the age of twenty-three, may be her most aching work. She has written books about her extramarital affair, the death of her mother, and a brush with breast cancer.
Ernaux, who is seventy-nine years old, is not well known outside of France, but in her native country she is considered something of a literary lioness, for her stouthearted willingness to mine material from her own life. Last year, the British publisher Fitzcarraldo re-issued “ L’événement” (“Happening”), a memoir by the French writer Annie Ernaux.