Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, Céline Sciamma, 2019, France, Colour, 122 mins, Certificate: 15
Have you ever watched a film that you felt you can touch?
This is it.
Sciamma has an uncanny ability to capture sound in such a way that makes her films tangible.
Especially this film.
You will feel the charcoal sticks, the brushes and the paint in and on the hands of the young painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant), the paper and the canvas under them. The sand, the sea, the sun and the wind on the hands and the face of her subject – the young bride to be, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel).
You will feel each other’s skin and the weight of their clothes on it.
Every touch, every contact, every hold.
This is how this celebrated, multi award wining, complex in its simplicity, piece of (queer) cinematic art becomes a holistic, intimate and deeply personal experience.
This is how we celebrate 50 years of UK Pride.
This is how we bid farewell to the Summer and give an apt nod to the beginning of the next season and our Sydenham Arts Artist Trail 2022 screening in September – with a touch and a brush on fire.
Have you ever watched a film burning?
This is it.
Reviews:
““Do all lovers feel as if they’re inventing something?” Hélöise asks Marianne, her first lover. Yes, perhaps that’s what Sciamma conveys through the film’s entirety. Love is not a series of gestures, nor a written script, but an original work of art, begun for the first time, again and again.” Caroline Tsai, The Playlist
★★★★★ “Some types of desire lead to one partner dominating or obliterating the other. Sciamma petitions for a love that leaves you buoyed, rather than destroyed.” Sophie Monks Kaufman, Empire