A true tragedy of late-stage capitalism has befallen me. After having watched Céline Sciamma’s exquisite Portrait of a Lady on Fire no more than a week ago, and having subsequently conceived of the idea for this piece, I returned to the amusement-castle of Netflix only to find myself barred from its gates – left outside its newly reinforced walls like a perfidious pauper unfit to witness the merriments within. In my disgraced state I set to wandering. Soon I realised I was not alone in the dark, austere environs of castle Netflix – the gates had finally been closed on all of us unpaying revellers. We were the cast-out, the discarded; we had sat insolent at high tables for too long, having no right to presume our presence welcome, leeching on the generosity of friends and family members.
Some of us rambled into the nearby woods of Amazon, whose leaders had not yet called for our exclusion, others made fires to sit around, realising in each-other’s ephemeral company that those stories we thought we knew we in fact possessed only in fragments, and could recount only piecemeal… as for me, I retired to a secluded spot under a sheltering tree with quill and parchment, to ascribe thereon the musings that had arisen from my final sojourn in the castle. I was fortunate to have in my possession an English translation of Céline Sciamma’s script, to which I am indebted to the hard work carried out at www.tumblr.com/mlleclaudine. What follows are those musings:
When it first became apparent – after 30 seconds or so of its duration – that Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s closing shot of Héloïse’s face was going to be the coup de grâce of the film, I felt let down. To linger on the face of a woman overcome with emotion at a symphony seemed to my too-cynical mind a played-out, insincere and overblown end to an otherwise emotionally graceful work of art. But the longer I watched Adèle Haenel cry to the music the more I realised how wrong I had been – now I can’t conceive of a more perfect ending to the film.
What we are seeing is Héloïse remembering. And it dawned on me that memory had all along been the key to the heart of this work. The closing shot is a magnificent moving portrait of the kind mastered by Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman. It is not the only portrait of a lady on fire in this film, but it is perhaps the portrait of a lady on fire. At least, it is the one that we are left with.
What is doubly significant is that Marianne – though she herself goes unseen – watches Héloïse crying. The two women have grown to love each other over the course of the film but by this point have been separated for several years. The core premise of the narrative is that Marianne was hired to paint a portrait of Héloïse in order that it could be presented to her suitor in Milan. We have watched as Marianne’s love has grown. We have seen her struggle to complete her task – even wiping Héloïse’s face from a portrait that she had already completed after its subject asked her if it was an accurate representation of how she saw her.
She cannot reconcile herself with freezing in time an image of a love that is only yet beginning to bud, even less so as an advertisement for a man that neither of them have met. But by the film’s end, a small handful of images is all she has left – materially, at least – of Héloïse. So when she sees her at the concert hall, and when the camera shows us Héloïse’s tears in prolonged close-up, it is as if Marianne’s paintings had come to life. Finally she is able to see the face that she loves animated once more, and animated no less by the memory of her.
Earlier in the film she tells Héloïse – who has never attended a concert and knows only organ music from church – that she attends as many symphonies as she can, and she speaks favourably of the music in Milan. ‘Long Live Milan.’ says Héloïse sarcastically. ‘I’m just saying that there will be good things.’ says Marianne. ‘What you’re saying is that from time to time I’ll be consoled.’ Having seen this interaction, we have no doubt that Héloïse’s experience of the symphony, and presumably every other symphony she has attended or will attend, is now bound up with her memory of the woman who loved them, and who loved her.
When Marianne watches her watching the orchestra it is an inversion of the means by which she has lived out her connection to Héloïse since their separation – instead of she herself being moved before the still image of her lost lover, she is now the one watching as Héloïse is moved to tears.
Sciamma moulds their relationship in the clay of memory from the beginning. It is understood that they will only be spending a few days in each other’s company, and when they confess their love a kind of dreadful duty descends on them, like a deeper emotion revealed beneath a flirtatious smile by a masterful painter. It is their duty to remember each other. The short-lived affair is a story that has been told time and time again – some of my other favourite modern(ish) cinematic examples are Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love and Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. But Portrait of a Lady on Fire stands as one of most resonant tellings of this kind of story precisely because of how intentionally Sciamma makes memory her central theme.
Even while still together, Marianne and Héloïse invoke their future memories of each other like ghosts – their present is haunted by the knowledge that it will soon be past. On their final night together, after Marianne has sketched a picture of herself for Héloïse to keep, the pair lie facing each other in bed. ‘Don’t go to sleep. Don’t go to sleep.’ Marianne repeats, kissing Héloïse’s eyelids when they close. The bittersweet sorrow that soaks the scene is memory’s shadow looming, almost ready now to take this union into its domain.
The lovers know this, and they want to know what will become of them, each in the memory of the other. ‘I’ll remember the time you fell asleep in the kitchen.’ says Marianne. ‘I’ll remember your glare when I beat you at cards.’ says Héloïse. ‘I’ll remember the first time you laughed.’ ‘I’ll remember the first time I wanted to kiss you.’ ‘When was that?’ ‘You tell me.’ Between two lovers, an interaction like this is like asking a fortune teller for your fate; except it is not asking merely what you will be, but, what is more important and much more urgent, asking the loved one: what will I be to you.
Nostalgia is the afterglow of a thing’s radiance made apparent by its absence. But the game of evocation that Marianne and Héloïse play brings the nostalgic sensibility into the present; they are able to witness the glow in real-time, and experience its object two-fold. This is the nature of the potent sweetness that pairs with the gut-wrenching bitterness in stories about lovers who are to be pulled apart too soon. Sometimes nostalgia’s glow is only visible to us the audience, pre-empting what we know will happen. Other times, like here, the characters share in it too, and then we see a kind of romance that by necessity exists in a sort of heightened fever. It is too much at once – to kiss someone in the same breath that is already preparing to sigh at their leaving, to fall in love with a person at the same time as constructing a memory of them with just enough lifeblood to give succour when they’re gone. And it is precisely because it is too much that is so enveloping and enrapturing.
And like all that enraptures; it enchants, it warps. Several times throughout the film Marianne sees a vision of Héloïse in a white bridal dress. It is a spectral vision of the future – in the moment when the two of them eventually come to exchange their final glance, Héloïse will match the vision exactly in attire and attitude. Marianne is visited by this moment that has yet to happen, as if the mournfulness which keeps her thinking ahead is drawing the future nearer.
It is not the only way in which their final moment is foreshadowed, however. There is a scene before the lovers have expressed their feelings, in which Héloïse is reading aloud the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice for the entertainment of Marianne and the housemaid Sophie – all three of them are engrossed in the tale. Héloïse recounts the part at which Orpheus has convinced the court of Hades to give him back Eurydice from the dead, and they have agreed on condition that he lead her, in her limping, wounded state, out of the underworld without once looking back at her. Only once they are back in the world of the living can he look upon her. Just before they reach the surface, he can’t help but look back ‘for fear of losing her’, too eager to see and to embrace her, to welcome her back into the light of life. In doing so he condemns her back to the abyss.
Sophie deplores his rashness: ‘No, he can’t look at her for fear of losing her. That’s no reason. He was told not to do that.’ ‘He’s madly in love. He can’t resist.’ retorts Héloïse. But Marianne, the artist of the trio, sees it differently: ‘He could resist. His reasons aren’t serious. Perhaps he makes a choice… He chooses the memory of her. That’s why he turns. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s.’ Just before Marianne departs the island, Héloïse calls to her from behind. She chooses to look. She can’t resist. In this moment, she has made the lover’s choice.
But perhaps she has already made the poet’s choice, and with much more finality. Earlier, when Héloïse says (in relation to the wishes of her mother and her suitor): ‘You would prefer that I resist.’ Marriane replies: ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you asking me to?’ says Héloïse. ‘No.’ says Marianne. Is this her moment of choosing? With this simple no, like the hand that looses the guillotine, she has condemned Héloïse to memory – to that forgetful house in which departed souls live animated only in a fashion by the flame of poetry; a ghostly puppet house, in which the more the loved one is remembered the more of themselves they lose, and the more of the rememberer they gain.
So the preparation of Marianne’s memory of Héloïse is wrought with responsibility; the memory of a loved one is not for your keeping alone – it is a kind of devotion, an honouring, a promise to keep breathing the animating breath. When Héloïse criticises Marianne’s painting of her she feels that Marianne is betraying her responsibility. She says that the painting has ‘no life… no presence.’ Marianne responds, in far too painterly a fashion: ‘Your presence is made up of fleeting states, of momentary aspects. It may also lack veracity.’ Heloise’s sense of betrayal reaches its peak: ‘That it’s not close to me is something I can understand. But that it’s not close to you, that’s sad.’
This is the painting whose face Marianne smudges out of existence. She apologises to Héloïse’s mother – the commissioner of the painting – and promises to paint a more truthful representation of her daughter next time. But within herself she knows that there will never be a truthful representation; she would have to spend the rest of her life painting Héloïse after Héloïse, as she appeared to her each day, as their love grew, as their sense of each-other deepened. Maybe then, if each of those daily portraits were set side by side in some interminable gallery, she would have displayed a near-satisfactory impression of the woman she loves.
I’m reminded of a line from the song Sunday Morning Stasis by Joseph Fink (creator of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast): ‘Even as time’s moving, it’s just you in different clothing.’ To love someone is to want to pay them with your attention. But to try to make some kind of definitive document of them, as if they were a butterfly pinned to a page – that is betrayal. Later on, when Marianne is painting her again, Héloïse observes: ‘You didn’t destroy that last one for me. You did it for you.’ ‘I would like to destroy this one too,’ replies Marianne, ‘because through it I give to you another.’
The pleasure of possessing something is proportional to the misery of losing it. The further we climb the scale of pleasure the greater the fall we prepare for ourselves. Therefore ecstasy can only be proportional to despair – this is why, for example, so many ex-drug addicts seek religious and/or spiritual practices in recovery: someone who has acclimatised themselves to bliss through heroin use has also experienced the non-bliss of non-heroin use. Their personal scale of pleasure and pain has been widened at both ends by their experience, and so the void that must be filled in the absence of a substance that can elicit ecstatic states can only be done so by means that strive for comparable heights.
What Marianne and Héloïse manage to do as their time together draws to its end is to bring together their ecstasy and their despair – and all the more sweetly is each felt when in the company of its twin. The ecstasy they derive from each other’s presence, the despair they derive from their mutual loss. Lying there, playing their game of I’ll remember, they overlay reality with memory. This is the moment they wish would last forever: face to face, in bed together, as by its nature memory pulls away each passing second – like a boat forever unmooring – and yet, miraculously, in doing so reveals the remembered body to still be present. Ecstasy and despair are the interwoven threads of the cocoon the two women build for themselves in those final shared hours, and we enter with baited breath this precious space that Sciamma has invited us into, where each kiss is a poet’s flourish, each declaration of love a nascent goodbye; a seed planted later to bloom.