Review of Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Céline Sciamma reveals the full scope of her talent with her fourth feature film, "Portrait of a Lady on Fire". Applying the feminist preoccupations and gender fluidity of her previous work to this eminently lavish and soul-stirring period piece, Sciamma expands on the ideology present in her repertoire, thus asserting her status as a feminist auteur, modulating and unerringly capturing the viewpoint of constricted women in a patriarchal world without ever requiring a male beyond the edge of the frame. Women take centre stage here, and the effect is as revelatory, passionate and expressive as you would expect. Lucidly summoning up the past, in this case the 18th century, one enters a claustrophobic microcosm and quickly becomes swept up in the intensity, isolation and intimacy of it all. Simmering and slow-burning, "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" delivers a breathtakingly beautiful backdrop for its abundantly layered story, abounding with allusions, themes, references and details, concerning the forbidden love affair between a female painter tasked with painting, mainly from memory, a wedding portrait of a reluctant young bride without her consent. Owing to the gender inequality and social impediments of the era, it is unfeasible that the painter's love for her betrothed subject will materialise into anything beyond a series of encounters; the measured journey towards their brief connection proves more enchanting and rewarding than any far-fetched happy ending. Sciamma deftly subverts the male gaze theory by tempering the minimal exposition process of the leisurely paced, exceptionally lean narrative with attentively designed visions of the conflicted painter's experience. Exiguous with levels of complex, lovingly crafted, executed and performed cinematic art transcending time and place, "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" gives power to the powerless and is all the more astonishing a feat, succeeding where so many precursory films failed: a warranted, immersive experience entirely from a female perspective, ergo redeeming so many decades of the dominant male gaze in cinema.