Festival Report by Jeffrey Weir
Portrait of a Lady on Fire takes you into a hypnotic trip where you find yourself locked to the screen, never able to look away. One of the most talked-about films currently in the festival circuit, Portrait of a Lady on Fire has been almost universally praised for an assortment of reasons, from its gorgeous and draw-dropping cinematography to some of the best performances of the year that transcend any language gap. Céline Sciamma manages the difficult task of making a film that feels very personal to her own life yet so universal to anybody who has ever been in love.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the story of a painter named Marianne (Noémie Merlant) who is sent to do a portrait of a young lady, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who is about to be married to a man who she has no desire to be with. When Marianne arrives, however, she discovers why the last painter sent there did not do the portrait: because Héloïse refused to let him paint her. Marianne now must paint Héloïse without her knowledge.
The two leads of the film, Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel, are electric together. The amount of pain you feel from just them not being able to truly be together breaks your heart for the entire run time of the film and their chemistry can be compared to some of the best pairs in cinema such as Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in the Before Trilogy. The director chooses to focus far more on glances and looks the characters share rather than expressing through words; this choice makes every word they say to one another far more special and effective, yet the quiet moments the characters share remain more effective than any line of dialogue in the film.
The pacing is very slow. It’s a perfect slow burn. The film takes its time to slowly develop a relationship between our two lead characters and through this; it builds and builds upon its tension, and the audience understands where the story is going but the slow pace makes you feel so tense because you’re just wishing for the leads to find happiness in the end. The pace of the film makes it incredibly captivating, the audience gets to take in every bit of information and every small interaction, slowly coming closer and closer to the inevitability of the situation.
The cinematography is simply breathtaking, obviously due to the composition and framing of the camera, but also because the choice of locations puts you into a similar headspace to the lead character; our protagonist is sent into this unfamiliar setting that feels almost magical or otherworldly and the cinematography/locations make this feel like a different world for both the audience and lead. The colours pop throughout the entire film, focusing on mainly blues and oranges. The colours are bright and a fantastic juxtaposition to the quite depressing subject matter of the film, almost as if the filmmaker is trying to find the beauty in the sad experiences we face in life.
As soon as Portrait of a Lady on Fire ended, I knew I had witnessed something special. The film is tragic, depressing and genuinely heartbreaking but it also manages to find the beauty in the tragedies. Led by two of the best performances of the year, the film is surely to be looked back on as one of the greatest films of the 2010s.
Leave a Reply