Critics reviews

Behind the veil of a doomed queer love story, Sciamma adds a masterstroke to the rewriting of art history. Where would a light not ignited by the fire, the anger or the impatience of sexual difference come from? And more importantly, if we followed its trail, where would it lead us?

There are some films so exquisite that any attempt to put them into words feels like an act of violence.

It’s a rare musical moment in a sonically restrained film; the camera and Marianne fix unflinchingly on Héloïse as she listens raptly, a wrenching sequence of expressions registering on her face. Contrary to the privileged and possessive logic of the male gaze, Portrait of a Lady on Fire presents a queer love story in which looking can be intensely painful for the beholder.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is that rare movie in which every choice feels thought-out and meaningful. Just like the short time these women have together, it is minimal but ideal, without an image, glance, word, or brushstroke to spare.

What really sets this movie apart is that by looking for equality between its characters, it leaves a trail of delicately subverted expectations. Part of how it does this is by embracing the unique dynamics that are possible when the two people in love are both women.

Incandescent filmmaking of the highest order, the kind that permanently brands you with its soul-reaching flame, Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” an 18th century lesbian romance between a bright painter and her strong-willed subject, unquestionably turns the French auteur into a blazing master.

Sciamma has a great feel for structure, for emotional arcs, and for pinpoint-accurate catharses that nevertheless preserve the tantalizing enigma of her characters. The film is filled with moments of unforgettable intimacy and passion.

Sciamma and cinematographer Claire Mathon give the film the luscious, tactile beauty of an oil painting.

Sciamma composes static tableaux featuring Haenel and Merlant in poses that feel both spontaneous and taut, rigidly unnatural and utterly authentic. The two actresses are relentlessly graceful, endowed with physical aplomb, contemplative insight, and strong emotion.

If the film lurches at times with schematic dudgeon—devolving into a checklist of coolly outraged points to be made—it also gloriously blooms as a tale of lesbian ardor.

French filmmaker Céline Sciamma, who directed Girlhood and wrote Being 17 and the insouciant animated film My Life as a Zucchini, makes her most ambitious film yet in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Sciamma’s 19th-century story ventures into what we think of as the literary past  —The Brontës, Stendhal and, of course, Henry James — for a love story that fashionably goes against convention.

It is not enough to say that Portrait of a Lady on Fire is about queer desire, but rather about the queerness inherent in desire.  The film returns again and again to this notion—to the heartbreaking but sublimely felt experience of desire as that which is suspended, but immortalized in possibility.