“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” is a Film Free of Men and The Male Gaze (Thank God)
By: Jamie Margolin
Tags: Queer, LGBTQ, Film, Film Reviews, Lesbian

Héloïse posing for Marianne in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

In pop culture, people tend to think of “lesbian” more as a search term on a porn site than an actual identity. While ‘lesbian’ was the most searched term of the year on two of world’s biggest porn sites in 2018, our stories make a patherically tiny percentage of stories told on the big screen in movie theaters and in mainstream television. Millions of people love watching “hot girl-on-girl action” in secret, but when it comes to thinking of lesbians as actual people, with unique life experiences and stories that deserve to be told outside of the male fetishistic gaze, most of Hollywood falls short. When you’re a young girl coming to terms with the fact that you like girls, you seek out representations of yourself in the media to feel less alone.

The issue is, there are not a lot of quality films out there for queer women and femmes, and that leaves us clinging desperatley to subpar media. A film that a lot of queer girls and femmes of my generation clung onto was Blue is The Warmest Color, a French movie about two girls in love that is directed by a heterosxual white man. Something that disturbed many viewers (including myself) is that it featured a 7 minute long sex scene (with no background music might I add). 7 minutes long. The film left me feeling not represented, but rather kind of icky. I am not undermining the fact that the film meant a lot to many people, and there are definitely some good aspects to it. I know the movie holds a special place in some queer people’s hearts. For me though, Blue is The Warmest Color felt a lot like a straight guy was sitting there thinking, “girl-on-girl is so sexy” and then made a movie brigning his fantasies to life. But Blue is The Warmest color is not the problem here, it’s a symptom of the problem. The problem is that Hollywood has a serious lesbian and queer women representation malfunction. The focus always seems to be from the outside looking in. The male gaze staring upon women in love. Beyond that, there always seems to be an aspect of shame and humiliation in movies about women in love. They for some reason always have to include a scene where the women are humiliated for being in love, or punished, outed, or reprimanded in some way for their queerness.

Céline Sciamma’s film, Portait of a Lady on Fire is the perfect rebuttal to those tropes. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an example of the solution to the tired, male-gazey lesbian movie that often seems more like male fantasy porn than actually a story of two women in love. The film is also free of shame, free of judgment, and free of the idea that all queer stories must have some sort of excessive trauma inflicted on the protagonists. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the beginning of an answer to bad lesbian representation, and it does this through avoiding falling into the trap of trauma porn, completely avoiding the male gaze by not even including men in the story, and talking about taboo topics without shame or judgement.

Héloïse and Marianne on the beach in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

The film is about Marianne, a young woman, is commissioned to secretly paint the portrait of aristocrat Héloïse, a young woman who doesn’t want to get married. The portrait is to be sent to Héloïse’s suitor in Milan. If he likes the portrait, he will marry her. Marianne is instructed by Héloïse’s mother to paint Héloïse in secret, pretending to be a hired companion for walks along the beach. During their walks together Marianne studies Héloïse and tries to memorize her features so she can paint her from memory in secret at night. The two women start to bond, and on sight, there is an instant chemistry and fascination with each other. Héloïse is a calm and yet deeply angry woman — a woman “on fire.” Her anger and fire comes from being forced to live a life she doesn’t want, and her eventual romance with Marianne is how she can finally express that fire. Marianne comes clean to Héloïse that she is actually there to paint her portrait, and when Marianne shows Héloïse the first initial impersonal portrait she painted from her stolen glances of Héloïse at the beach, Heloise is deeply offended. She feels that Marianne should know her on a much more intimate level. Marianne is frustrated but agrees, and she wipes the painting and starts the portrait anew, while Héloïse’s mother travels for several days to Italy. While the mother is traveling, Marianne and Héloïse grow closer and closer and become intimate lovers. Their artist-muse dynamic intensifies, but eventually, the artist and muse fall in love with each other, blending life and art. Their love story ends up becoming a piece of art itself, and the portrait that Marianne paints becomes so much more than a portrait, it is a representation of their love for eachother, a product of their powerful yet simple love story. The women tragically are not able to end up with each other. Héloïse marries a man she’ll never love, and Marianne goes her own way, working as a painter showcasing her art under her fathers name. The ending shot of the movie shows the two women, separate from each other, never getting their happily ever after, longing for each other and remembering their fleeting time together. No matter what happens, they will always have a special place in each other’s hearts, and no one can take away the moments they shared together. They are unashamed of the time they spent together.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire subverts the stereotypical lesbian period-piece trope of the lovers being outed and ostracized. So much of the lesbian stories are pretty much trauma porn. Women are outed, ridiculed, traumatized and punished for being in love. For a long time the only way lesbian stories were allowed to be told in the mainstream is if there was some punishment at the end for the women in love. If the lesbians made it out unscathed, then that wouldn’t be warning society against lesbianism like a lot of storytellers were pressured to do. So if storytellers wanted to tell a queer story, they had to do it by making sure one of the gay lovers died at the end, or loses everything, or has their life ruined in some way. Oftentimes in stories that show queer love, the storyteller seems to be intentional in dragging the gay characters through as much hell as physically possible, and humiliating the queer lovers. Portrait of a Lady on Fire subverts that. Neither woman dies. Neither woman is outed. No one is punished for being in love. The focus is not on concequences at all, the focus is on the love story. And while it ultimately ends in heartbreak since Héloïse and Marianne can not share a life together, the suffering is not excessive and humiliating for either women. It is simply heartbreak.

Still from Portrait of a Lady on Fire

It struck me how shocked I was by the lack of humiliation and shame in this film, partially because I’ve grown so accustomed to seeing gay romances end in ridicule and “concequences” for the “sinful” lovers. It’s a breath of fresh air to see two women in love make it out okay. This lack of excessive trauma was an intentional decision by director Céline Sciamma. “We know about the oppression, about the domination, so we’re not going to lose time portraying this,” Sciamma said in an interview, “So even though it’s an impossible love between them [Héloïse and Marianne], that’s not even discussed. It’s not a tension or a dilemma. It’s about what’s possible when they are away from the male presence.” This best summarizes Sciamma’s purpose for creating this film. Showing the beauty women can create for ourselves when men are not around. Avoiding spending so much time discussing the risks and consequences of queer love, and simply just experiencing queer love without any baggage or distraction.

Sciamma made a conscious decision to make men virtually absent from the film. That was one of this first things I noticed when watching Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I was sitting there watching it thinking, It’s so weird that there are no men in this movie. And then that turned into glee, Oh thank god there are no men in this movie! There are some minor cameos where men appear on screen, but since the story is so focused on women, the men don’t seem like a normal part of the story — their appearance feels like an intrusion. This was an intentional directorial decision. Sciamma explains in an interview, “The boatman who delivers Marianne to the island and then so rudely reappears to reclaim her is an unwelcome figure. When he comes back at the end, it’s like a scare jump. I love that [audiences] get to experience that like, ‘Oh, the patriarchy is back’.” Sciamma created a safe haven for an audience where they get to escape a male dominated narrative for a few hours, and immerse themselves in a female outlook on the world.

There is a scene where Héloïse and Marianne go to a Bonfire, and a group of women start chanting and singing a song that sounds almost godly and etherial. Marianne spots Héloïsee on the opposite side of the Bonfire, and the sparks crackle and fly over Héloïse’s face as Marianne admires her. The music in the background the women are singing seems otherworldly, and as Marianne and Héloïse glance at eachother, no words need to be exchanged to know they are in love. It is a moment of pure beauty, desire, and love. Heloise’s dress catches fire and she becomes the literal woman on fire the movie title references. This scene is Portrait of a Lady on Fire in a nutshell. Completely focused on women and the female gaze. So ethereal that it seems almost otherworldly. The power in the film being the deep glances that the women give each other. Passion understood wordlessly.

Beyond the lesbian love story, there is also an important subplot in the film about Sophie, the maid who is in the house with Héloïse and Marianne, and forms a close friendship with both women. Sophie has an unwanted pregnancy, and Heloise and Marianna accompany her in getting an abortion. Just like how free of shame and stigma the lesbian plot-line of this film is, the abortion storyline is also free of shaming. There is no conversation about, “how dare you kill this fetus!” or “abortion is a sin!” or any shaming or horrific concequences for Sophie for having an abortion. Sciamma makes the conscious decision to leave shame and societal consequences of “taboo” topics, like homosexuality and abortion, completely out of the film. While many directors would have focused on how scandelous and forbidden it was for two women to be in love, or for a woman to get an abortion during this time period, Sciamma made the decision to simply let the storylines play out without judgment.

Sciamma, in an interview with Vox, explains why she made abortion a central plotpoint of the movie. “There’s this French author named Annie Ernaux, and she wrote a book about her own abortion, and in this book, she says there is no museum in the world where there is a frame called “The Abortion.” It’s an everyday thing, but it’s never represented. And why?” So Sciamma decided to include a very sensitvley and compassionately handled abortion storyline in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. She explains in the Vox interview, “When you’re looking at something that hasn’t been represented much, you’re filling a void. But it has to belong to this film. It’s not about making an abortion scene. It’s about making the abortion scene of that film and the fact that there’s a child on the bed consoling [Sophie as she goes through the abortion]. It’s the grammar of the film, which is a lot about people consoling each other. Those three things were really important to me in the process of making this scene. And also telling the audience that abortion is not about not liking kids. It’s about having the kids you want, when you want.”

Sophie and Marianne in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Everything about Portrait of a Lady on Fire, from the color palette, to the cinematography, to the acting, to the camera positioning, is about being kind, gentle, and sensitive to the feelings and stories of the female protagonists as they go through what are considered “taboo” experiences, without holding any judgment. The main colors seen in the film are green, light blue, beige, and a lot of muted pastels. Candlelight is very present in the film, helping to illuminate the white and beige colors seen in the bed and nightgowns of Marianne and Héloïse. The color palette and feel of the movie can be described in one word: gentle.

And that’s what Portrait of a Lady on Fire is to it’s core. Gentle and compassionate towards stories that are usually treated with harshness, judgment, and scrutiny. The cinematography is not invasive, the performances of the actresses are not over the top. There is no big explosive broadway-style acting, everything about the way the actresses portray their characters is subtle. It’s about subtle facial expressions, subtle but powerful glances, short and quiet but poignant comments. No characters have big powerful monologues. Sciamma chooses to give the characters minimal lines and makes them as short as possible, which almost makes them more powerful. Every single word uttered by Sophie, Heloise and Marianne is intentional and serves a purpose. But nothing is overbearing. The whole film comes across subtle, but the story being told is quietly radical.

The reason why this movie so delicately and beautifully represents lesbian love, is that it was directed by a lesbian. The film actually stars Sciamma’s ex-girlfriend, French actress Adèle Haenel. So both the director and main actress are queer women. When stories are told by members of the community, they are much more compassionate and accurate. The by lesbians-for-lesbians filming environment of Portrait of a Lady on Fire starkly contrasts the exploitative nature of what was reported on the set of Blue is the Warmest Color.

In, “A Brief History of All the Drama Surrounding Blue Is the Warmest Color” by Anna Silman, it is discussed how the heterosexual male director, Abdellatif Kechiche, overworked and made the actresses of his film feel extremely uncomfortable. The actresses had to do sex acts again and again and again, under the view of a very demanding heterosexual male director. Anna Silman writes, “In a review that day, Manohla Dargis of the New York Times argued that the film’s sex scenes weren’t so much art as voyeuristic exertions of the male gaze, writing that Kechiche “registers as oblivious to real women” and that “the movie feels far more about Mr. Kechiche’s desires than anything else.”” Julie Maroh, author of the comic-book novel that the movie was based on, said, “This was what was missing on the set: lesbians.” And thats what it comes down to. When LGBTQ+ people are not on set in the filming of our own stories, things can go very wrong.

Hollywood still has a long way to go when it comes to representing lesbians and queer women and femmes. It is important to note that Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a story about white women, and so are a huge chunck of mainstream movies about queer women. Lesbian films have as much of a race problem as they do a male-gaze problem. Does Portrait of a Lady on Fire itself, one lesbian movie about white women, erase decades of harmful representation? No. Does Portrait of a Lady on Fire represent the experiences of all queer women? No, not even close. Is this one movie the only rebuttle to Hollywood’s bad gay representaion problem? Absolutley not. That is way too much weight and pressure to put on one film. What Portait of a Lady on Fire is, is a beautiful film that is a big step in the right direction. This does not mean the Hollywood can rest on its laurels and say, “Well folks, we did it. There is at least one quality lesbian film. Back to heteronormativity!” Portrait of a Lady on Fire should be seen as a gentle but deeply powerful battle cry that it is possible to for Hollywood to do better by queer women. And they must.