Portrait of a Lady on Fire review – achingly romantic and burning with passion

It’s the title that gets you first. At once familiar and yet totally alien, it is an enigma and a mystery. Say it out loud, and that second part – “on fire” – has a jarring effect. Is the portrait on fire, we must ask, or does it refer to a portrait of a lady who is actually on fire? Quickly we learn what this painting is, in an art lesson where teacher Marianne (Noémie Merlant) scorns a student for taking it out of storage. “What’s the title?” another student asks, sensing there is a story. “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” she announces, sadly, with the audacity of a title card, camera inching slowly towards her.

Céline Sciamma, the French filmmaker whose Girlhood was one of the best films of 2014, has returned with an even more assured follow-up. Its focus once again is on young women learning to find themselves in a world that doesn’t seem to understand, or care. The narrative, set in 18th century France, concerns the melancholy but achingly romantic union between Marianne and Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), a young woman whose mother has hired Marianne to paint her portrait so that she might attract a wealthy suitor in Milan. Héloïse does not wish to be painted, however, and so Marianne must paint her in secret – a brilliant plot point with a delicious, Hitchcockian flavour.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a film that plays out almost entirely in stolen glances and subtle looks, in moments where a few seconds of eye contact comes to mean just as much as a kiss. Merlant, in particular, has the most piercing gaze, seemingly able to convey the whole spectrum of human emotion in a momentarily glance. Her eyes – dark, huge, all-knowing – are perfectly suited to Sciamma’s tale of brief but doomed romance, where every second must be savoured in the knowledge that it cannot last. Both women, playing characters who know they should be together but can’t, share a wonderful and deeply felt chemistry; as Sciamma holds the camera on their longing looks, forgoing words in favour of desirable gazes, it is impossible not to feel the burning passion passing between them.

There are magnificent sequences, like the one at the film’s centre that sees the pair attending a nighttime gathering at a bonfire. Here they stare at one another across the flames as other women break into choral song around them. Why this is happening, exactly, doesn’t matter. But it’s a cathartic moment that splits the movie right down the middle. Later, when a man suddenly appears in a frame, unannounced, it stuns us, and we realise how the narrative has come to feel so free without the burden of the other sex. The appearance is shocking, jolting us back to reality against our will; unwanted reaffirmation of the biased world these women inhabit.

The film has a painterly quality and is beautiful composed and shot by cinematographer Claire Mathon. Shooting this period romance on digital could have proven detrimental, but in Mathon’s hands the decision pays off: there is a contemporary atmosphere that keys us into these women’s emotions without the usual stuffiness of period drama. And whilst the film, at times, can feel cold and clinical, it ultimately serves to enhance the sense of place, of the draughty house where these women are only able to find warmth in each other.

An abortion subplot concerning a maid, played by Luàna Bajrami, distracts from the central pairing in a way that feels unnecessary. I’m also convinced that Sciamma overplays the ending slightly. She gives us two codas, when – in a film that shows so much restraint elsewhere – one really would have been enough. Still, it’s hard to imagine a modern period drama that finds such a balance of the past and the present without compromising either era. This is a love story that will age as gracefully as Marianne’s portraits.