The Pared-Down Love of Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Pyramide Films
The simplicity of Portrait of a Lady on Fire is apparent from the first scenes, opening on a spacious art studio where Marianne, an artist, is teaching a drawing class to a group of young girls, neatly arranged in a semicircle around her. From there we move to the flashback that occupies most of the film, which begins with Marianne’s journey on a small boat to the seaside estate where Héloïse, the young woman she’s been commissioned to paint, lives. Within that boat ride, arrival on shore, and entrance into the house are so many clean, elemental forms: wooden boat on teal sea; Marianne’s plain, rust-colored dress; the crags of rock jutting from smooth beach; the dark, empty house at the edge of an outcropping of trees. This essentiality, the bare-bones nature of the setting and costumes and story, is beautiful in and of itself, but more importantly aids in presenting the romance at the film’s center as an idealized, absolute love, which makes its inevitable and abrupt end all the more heartbreaking.
The clean lines that form the film’s opening persist throughout, as Marianne and Héloïse live at the estate and walk through its grounds, returning often to the cliffs overlooking the water, the beach, the modest kitchen with dark wood table and benches, and Marianne’s sun-filled makeshift studio with its whitewashed walls and plenty of empty space. The women are the only other objects sharing these spaces, in their rich-hued dresses an immense presence, big skirts commanding the pared-down space. The most indelible images of the film focus on the singularity of their forms: Marianne sitting naked, nearly silhouetted, in front of a fireplace, smoking a pipe as she waits for her canvases to dry; Héloïse, betrayed by Marianne, undressing in front of the ocean to take a swim, the shot composed only of the stretching horizontals of sand, water, and sky, with Héloïse standing in the middle; even the sequence in which Marianne first meets Héloïse, viewing her first as a hooded figure in dark blue, then her blonde hair as the hood falls, her sprinting to the cliff’s edge, then at last, hitting you like a shot, her face as she whips her head back to stare at Marianne, her wide green eyes, heavy brows, full lips. Everything is so unadorned, so that you have nothing to focus on but Marianne and Héloïse, and follow the relationship of these two women from beginning to end, taking us along for the entire life of their romance as they live it out in their perfect fantasy world of just the two of them.
Pyramide Films
The visual simplicity is mirrored in setting and story. There’s something pure about the time and place of the film, not just the isolated seaside house empty but for Marianne, Héloïse and her maid, removed from society, but the time period as well. Set toward the end of the eighteenth century, there’s a lack of clutter that to the modern-day viewer is downright enviable: no phones, no screens of any kind, no noise and aggressive images. In other words, none of the contemporary anxieties of and barriers to love.
Story-wise, the task that Marianne is sent to the house to do, painting a portrait, has some directness about it as well. There she is in her stripped-down studio, natural light filtering through thin muslin curtains, unhurriedly layering color upon color to coalesce into the image of a person. The painting, though it also forms the symbolic roadblock to their romance, is what begins Marianne’s interest in Héloïse–with looking intently, constantly at someone, to memorize their features, see how the light hits their face, obsession comes naturally. As their relationship develops, from initial curiosity to magnetism to deep affection, ideas of solitude, and being apart from or assimilating with society, recur. Héloïse notes that in remaining in solitude one day she found liberty but also Marianne’s absence; solitude standing within the film as a whole for the liberation their relationship represents and a recognition of the impossibility of it as well, that it can only exist in this separate, singular state, doomed once it comes into contact with anyone else. It is the way that Marianne’s first portrait is a failure, how when her image of Héloïse encounters the rules and conventions of the academy, it curdles and becomes this horrible facsimile of its subject, all pink cheeks and placid smile. Héloïse’s primary criticism is that it’s not “close to” Marianne, that she was allowing an outsider in when she was painting.
Their unfettered aloneness, the way their relationship pulses with affection when everyone else in the world is forgotten, is the crux of two of the film’s most iconic moments as well. The first is their night at a bonfire, a gathering of women from the island, all surrounded by utter darkness with the red warmth of the fire in the middle. The women start to sing, preceded by this otherworldly hum, but Héloïse and Marianne remain apart from it. They’re in their own world, each the sole figure in their respective frames as the camera cuts between them, nothing else at that moment for the two of them, falling in love with each other over the fire. Héloïse’s dress catches fire and she still stands there, not taking her eyes off Marianne, so fixated. She admits later that she wanted to kiss Marianne there, and the next day Marianne does just that, following Héloïse behind a cliff on their beach walk. Héloïse runs away, sending Marianne into distress that she did the wrong thing, only assuaged when she finds Héloïse in her room at night and it’s clear her feelings are reciprocated. “Do all lovers feel like they’re inventing something,” Héloïse asks, Marianne’s head on her shoulder. The sentiment is universal, but speaks to how their romance feels so new, distinct, as if no one has ever had one like it. That’s the essence of their love, this unadulterated, exciting emotion that they feel they alone possess, no one else involved.
Pyramide Films
The way that this idealized romance is so violently, quickly destroyed in the film’s end makes it all the more tragic. It’s here that Portrait reveals really how good it is, shows in the last fifteen minutes how it’s going to lodge itself in your brain, starting with the abrupt end to Héloïse and Marianne’s private world. They wake up together on the morning of Héloïse’s mother’s arrival, her mother views the painting, then tells Héloïse to come with her, that she has a present for her. Marianne follows soon after to say goodbye to Héloïse and her mother, and comes upon Héloïse wearing the present, her wedding dress. Marianne hugs the both of them, her two-second goodbye to Héloïse devastating as she rips herself away and flees down the stairs, the bridal Héloïse that had haunted her throughout the film following her, stopping on the steps and imploring her to turn around, standing there, open, in her diaphanous dress with all its trimmings, there to be given to someone else. As Marianne shuts the door, Héloïse is alone; the light coming through the doorway, from the outside, extinguished.
It happens in an instant, from private safe sacred love to the mother’s return to the viewing of the portrait to wedding dress and shut door. To call it hasty in relation to everything that has happened prior is an understatement. Years later, then, Marianne sees Héloïse twice more, chance encounters that the now-married Héloïse is unaware of. The first comes at an exhibition Marianne is taking part in under her father’s name. Her painting is of Orpheus and Eurydice, the Greek legend that Héloïse and Marianne read in the warm light of her kitchen, and a male patron remarks how unusual and lovely it is to capture the two in the moment they say goodbye, reaching for each other, instead of before or after. Marianne walks around the exhibition, unexpectedly coming across her own lost lover, here in a new portrait. She’s instantly recognizable, even when drawn more conventionally, soft rather than defiant as she was in Marianne’s, a blonde child at her side. But in her hand is a book, unmarked beside the page her finger bookmarks, “28,” the page Marianne drew a portrait of herself on for Héloïse to remember her by.
Héloïse’s memory of Marianne is clear in the last scene as well, Marianne spying her across a concert hall in a balcony, sitting alone in her box. The orchestra starts up, and it’s the dramatic presto to Vivaldi’s “Summer,” the piece Marianne played for Héloïse back in her studio at the house. Marianne watches her, the camera zooming, zooming, as you beg for her to look at the camera one last time, like she did on the cliff, to join Marianne in their own private world for one more moment. Instead we watch as her breathing gets heavier, her eyes tear, and finally she’s overwhelmed, crying, and smiling too, surely the sublime of their whole affair compressed into those two minutes, an ideal, discrete chapter never to be opened again.