by Helen Barlow
At the London Film Festival, artistic director Tricia Tuttle introduced Celine Sciamma as her favourite filmmaker before her Screen Talk with Sciamma. At the Stockholm Film Festival, which also has a female artistic director, Git Scheynius, the festival had a strong women’s focus and gave a Visionary Award to the French filmmaker. The cover of the festival catalogue was emblazoned with the two female protagonists embracing in Sciamma’s latest hit film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
Sciamma, who won the best screenplay prize for the film in Cannes, is at the forefront of filmmaking in France and is becoming increasingly outspoken. She was one of the first signatories of the 50/50 by 2020 movement in French cinema and last year helped stage a women’s protest against inequality on the Cannes Palais steps where then jury president Cate Blanchett took part, front and centre.
With Portrait, Sciamma has enlisted an all-woman cast, in fact only four actresses. It’s not the first time she has narrowed her female focus. In her debut film Water Lilies it was teenage girls, in Tomboy it was mostly pre-adolescents, in Girlhood it was suburban black teenagers.
Portrait comes five years after Girlhood and Sciamma wanted a change from her previous contemporary coming-of-age stories.
“I’ve always had a passion for costume dramas, but I didn’t want to talk about that specific genre,” Sciamma explains. “I wanted to talk about women artists and show women at work and to talk about the creative relationship. In the second half of the 18th century women weren’t given the opportunity to be artists, rather, they were models, but some seized the opportunity. I discovered that at the time there were many women artists in France and hundreds in Europe. I wanted to tell a story of women’s emancipation.”
She was also keen to relate the action to the way things still happen today.
“I wanted to steer away from the male gaze, a concept in cinema where women are objects, not subjects. Basically, the plot in the film is the gaze and some critics have called Portrait ‘a female gaze movie’, which is not so good marketing-wise,” she chuckles.
Set in the French seaside province of Brittany in 1770, the film follows Marianne (impressive newcomer Noemie Merlant), a painter who is commissioned to paint a portrait of Heloise (Adele Haenel), a young woman after a husband. The painting will be a calling card for male suitors, though Heloise is not too keen on her mother’s plan. She had been unimpressed with the previous painter who had tried to paint her, so Marianne has to prepare her painting in secret. Eventually though, the pair bond, and fall in love.
The film is slow and beautiful and creeps up on you. It’s the kind of movie that’s easy to see twice. The nuances are strong.
“I wanted to write a love story from the perspective of women, a careful patient story about desire,” Sciamma explains. “It’s not about two people looking lovingly at each other in an elevator. It’s the opposite. It’s about how love and desire, grows and flourishes, and it also has this other layer of the memory of love, of what started the love story. It’s about the dynamics, the philosophy, the politics of love. The film is a departure from my early films that were coming-of-age stories mostly with non-actors. This time I wanted to work with professional actresses, and I wanted to work again with Adele,” she says of her longtime partner, who had appeared in Water Lilies and her short film Pauline, and who has since become a major French star.
The writing of the Portrait screenplay proved a major chore.
“It took a long time and in some ways, it was good to have a delay,” Sciamma admits. “Writing is a very lonely process. No one read the script except my producer [her regular producer Benedicte Couvreur] until it was finished. It was a long, long process of thinking about it for two and a half years.”
Interestingly, Sciamma started writing with the ending in place, and without giving it away, it is extremely emancipating.
“That final scene encompasses what I wanted to say,” Sciamma notes. “I knew I had to have a strong vision. I think it’s a very positive end. Lesbians in cinema die, they suicide, they are killed, get sick or are suffering. It meant a lot to me to have this ending. I’m never really happy when people end up getting married in movies. It doesn’t tell you much about love. In Portrait their love made them brighter, more alive, more open and this is something I wanted to talk about.”
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is in cinemas December 26, 2019
