Regarding You, Regardez Moi - Part II
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) & “Syntax” by Carol Ann Duffy
Portrait of a Lady on Fire engages the notion of “the gaze” on multiple levels. On a literal level, it is a film about painting, about portraiture, about capturing the essence of a person with color, light, and shadow. On a thematic level, it is a film about gendered gaze— what does it mean for a man to look at a woman, for a woman to look at another woman? It asks complex questions about what a “male” or a “female” gaze might actually mean. In this way, it is also a meta commentary on the way that the “male gaze” has historically shaped the medium of cinema, and how modern filmmakers might go about deconstructing this notion in future work.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire tells the story of Marianne (Noémie Merlant), an artist hired to paint the portrait of Héloïse (Adele Haènel), a young French woman who is soon to be married off to a gentleman in Milan. The purpose of the portrait is so that Héloïse’s future husband can see what she looks like before marrying her, but this anonymous man, and men in general, are essentially physically nonexistent in the film. Instead, most of the film focuses on the relationship that develops between the two women as Marianne paints Héloïse’s portrait.
Initially, Marianne must paint in secret, as Héloïse doesn’t know that she’s an artist and thinks she’s just a companion for daily walks. Marianne spends these walks sneaking surreptitious glances, trying to memorize Héloïse’s features so that she can paint them later that night. However, from the very beginning, Héloïse resists the role of the passive, feminine subject. For the first few minutes after her character is introduced, we never even see her face, the camera always following her from behind. When she does finally let her hood fall and turns towards both Marianne and the camera, she gazes back at us with a disarming and bluntly confrontational attitude. She is anything but the docile, sweetly-mannered noblewoman that a portrait of the era would no doubt expect her to be.
“To look is an act of choice,” John Berger wrote in his classic work Ways of Seeing, but to be looked at, especially as a woman, is not an act of choice. Initially, Héloïse has no choice in being looked at, first by the failed, male portrait artist and then by Marianne. However, in the sequence where Marianne confesses her identity and shows Héloïse the portrait, Héloïse challenges Marianne on this very notion. “Is that how you see me?” she asks bluntly, clearly unsatisfied with Marianne’s characterization of her. “It’s not just me…” Marianne defends, a little taken aback at Héloïse’s criticism. “What do you mean, it’s not just you?” Héloïse pushes. “There are rules, conventions, ideas,” Marianne explains. “You mean there’s no life? No presence?” Héloïse says, looking her dead in the eye.
It is interesting that Marianne initially tries to defend her work by positioning herself as part of an artistic tradition that has, historically, been dominated by men. She has, without knowing it, participated in the “male gaze,” one which, out of tradition, would reduce Héloïse to a lifeless, beautiful model instead of allowing her true humanity to show through. The term “male gaze” was first coined in the 1970s by British film theorist Laura Mulvey to describe the way that cinema has developed as a predominantly male art form in which the camera functions like the male eye, reducing women to objects of erotic pleasure. As Mulvey wrote in her groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” a woman when viewed through the male gaze primarily functions as the silent “bearer of meaning, not the maker of meaning.”
This is, unwittingly, how Marianne has portrayed Héloïse, however, unlike films made through the male gaze, there is a discrepancy between how we, the audience, view the characters, and how the characters view each other. Not once in the film does the camera slip into the male gaze, maintaining instead a fundamental equilibrium in which Héloïse retains the full spectrum of her humanity, which she expresses freely. Marianne, disturbed by Héloïse’s negative reaction to the portrait, takes a long look at the painting and then scrubs out the face. She tells Héloïse’s mother that she’ll start again, and surprised by the gesture, Héloïse agrees to sit for this new portrait. This begins a long sequence in which the two women create the new portrait in frank verbal and visual reciprocity with one another.
There are many aspects of this film that are extraordinary, but one in particular is the way that Sciamma has crafted a film about the male gaze in which the male gaze is notably absent in the filmmaking. Instead, something that could be called a “female gaze” takes its place. I say “a female gaze” because the female gaze has yet to be defined with the same kind of clarity as the male gaze, and until there is as replete a body of work representing female gazes as there is male gazes, I don’t think a definitive “female gaze” can be claimed. But, if I were to hypothesize about a possible definition of a female gaze, I would suggest that a female gaze seeks not to possess its object, but rather to reveal or set free some element of its fundamental truth— to recognize it as it is, on its own terms. This is precisely what Héloïse and Marianne do over the course of the film, they learn to look at each other. Their gaze is reciprocal. Marianne seeks not to reduce Héloïse to an image, but rather to allow her to live through the painting. And all the while that Marianne is looking at Héloïse, Héloïse is looking right back at her.
It is interesting to note that throughout the film, Héloïse and Marianne se vouvoyer, they use the formal vous with each other, even after they become lovers. My knowledge of French linguistic history isn’t complete enough to know whether this is more a product of historical accuracy, or a deliberate choice on the part of writer/director Céline Sciamma. The one instance in which they use the informal tu, however, certainly seems like a deliberate choice.
It comes at the moment of their goodbye, as Marianne hastily leaves the house, having just seen Héloïse being fitted for her wedding dress and is unable to bear the sight. Héloïse runs after her, and just as Marianne is opening the door, she asks her to turn around using the informal command— retourne-toi. I’d be curious to know how this sudden switch from formal to informal feels to a native French speaker, as I can only really analyze it from a screenwriting perspective, in which it seems to emphasize the changed nature of their relationship and also the heartbreak inherent in the moment.
The “turn around” is a direct echo of their earlier conversation about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which Héloïse offered an interesting interpretation. “Perhaps she was the one who said, ‘Turn around,’” Héloïse hypothesized, upending the classical power dynamic of the story and placing Eurydice in charge of her own fate— choosing to remain, free, in the world of spirits rather than to return to Earth as the object of Orpheus’ affection. Casting herself now as Eurydice, she asks her lover to turn, knowing that either way, it can’t make a difference, as Marianne isn’t her Orpheus and has no power to keep her or free her from her current situation.
To circle back around to pronouns again, the difference between the male gaze and the female gaze might be summarized in the difference between her and you. The male gaze looks at a woman and says her whereas the female gaze looks at a woman and recognizes you. In this way, Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “Syntax” is a kind of linguistic gaze, as she addresses her lover in the second person, gazing at them in words. And like a gaze, which can be stopped, started, averted, or returned in multiple looks and glances, Duffy’s poem acknowledges the way that love never comes in one continuous flow. “Love’s language starts, stops, starts; / The right words flowing or clotting in the heart,” she writes.
The last couplet is a wonderful example of Duffy’s characteristic rhyming. Many of her poems rhyme, but they are never sing-song, rather they seem to point out the way that reality does often rhyme, but never quite as easily or in the ways we’d expect. And, in a way, this last couplet seems to rhyme with the final scene of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, in which Héloïse, now married and living in Milan, attends a symphony concert and hears the same piece of music that Marianne played for her years ago in that sparse studio on a little island off the coast of France. She sits in the wings of the theatre, chest heaving, the full spectrum of human emotion crossing her face as she tries to catch her breath and fails. It’s a beautiful closing scene, and a tour de force performance by Adele Haènel that lasts for several minutes uninterrupted.
I have one last tie to draw between these works, and that is how their creators masterfully upend our expectations of what we are about to experience. Duffy’s poems, and particularly the rhymes within them, are often brutal, funny, tender, queasy, and exquisite. I’m thinking of The World’s Wife in particular, in which Duffy retells famous myths and fables from the perspectives of the forgotten female characters, and how in that book, rhyme seems to recognize the storied roots of each poem while also systematically hacking the fairytale to pieces. Sciamma’s film does something similar. She takes genre labels and our accompanying expectations—period drama, lesbian romance, “women’s movie”—and lights them on fire. She doesn’t linger on the flame though; she’s not interested in waiting to watch the old ways fall apart, not when she could be creating something in the ashy, clear silence that follows the last pop of a coal extinguishing itself.
This is where Portrait of a Lady on Fire lives. Literally, on a tranquil island without men, but also figuratively, in a world of filmmaking that has left the male gaze and its tropes behind.