‘When you’re observing me, who do you think I’m observing?’
Cinema is about entertainment and connection. You can get by with one and not the other but never neither. The former is pretty easy. Hell, even the Transformers movies are pretty entertaining and they are just loud crashing noises and flashing lights for two hours. The latter is more difficult. There are films that will hook some people emotionally and not others. I never got anything from Lost in Translation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example. This doesn’t make them bad films necessarily, it just means I didn’t quite grasp the message those films were sending out.
And so, to a Portrait of a Lady on Fire…
Heloise (Adele Haenel) waits forlornly to be married off to a random stranger. Marianne (Noemie Merlant) is a talented painter tasked with conjuring up a wedding portrait of Heloise to give to her future husband. This simple premise twists and unwinds, hurtling towards its inevitably sad conclusion.
First off, I didn’t know anything about this film going in. I’d never heard of the lead actors or Celine Sciamma – the director. Both Haenel and Merlant excel here, bouncing off one another perfectly and really selling the gradual slip from aloof companionship to full blown affair. The script does a lot with a little with Sciamma preferring to tell her story with longing glances and beautiful panning shots of the French countryside.
The issue here, as is so often the case, is me. I liked Heloise and Marianne as characters, and I was kinda invested enough to stick with Portrait, but by the end I was impatiently waiting for the film to finish so I could watch cartoons. And I guess that’s the point. This is a heavy, arty film. If you’re not invested emotionally, it’s always going to drag.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire wasn’t for me then. But I can appreciate that it is a well made, worthy piece of cinema that others of a more romantic bent will probably thoroughly enjoy. If you’re an old curmudgeon like me however, maybe give it a miss.