Portrait of A Lady On Fire

By Hélène Dalmaire

You might recognize this stunning portrait from the 2019 movie “Portrait of a lady on fire”, for which the French artist Hélène Dalmaire painted this piece after the director saw her work online and asked her to design an original work of art for the film.

The plot of the movie is that a young female artist named Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is invited to a mansion on a secluded island. She has been commissioned to paint a portrait of the owner’s daughter, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). The portrait is intended to be sent as a gift to a potential suitor, in the hope that he will marry Heloïse, who wishes to remain unmarried. This means that in sitting for the portrait, she is effectively giving herself away, both literally and metaphorically.

The movie depicts the power struggle that ensues between the artist and the sitter, whose likeness represents the former’s livelihood and the latter’s symbolic erasure. The two women fall in love, and a dangerous romance ensues, in which the very thing that draws them together will also be that which forces them apart. A recurring motive of the film is the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and whether perhaps Eurydice wanted him to look back, so as to be his muse forevermore.

The film is both a beautiful meditation on the symbolic dispossession of the female form in art, as well as a romance about two lovers whose fate is to be separated.

The movie also features what is to my mind one of the most breathtakingly devastating closing shots: when Marianne, years later, sees Héloïse at the opera, instead of calling out to her she studies her features and watches closely as she is enraptured by a performance of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”. It’s a crushingly long take, in which we come to feel almost voyeuristic as we study her features cycling through various emotions, bliss, joy, ecstasy, rapture, and sadness.

If you haven’t seen the film, I highly recommend it. It’s a deeply thoughtful piece of filmmaking, and very beautiful. If you enjoy French cinema, I would highly recommend watching Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”.

Julian

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