And that’s what I rely on to make these images. They’re rooted in our own experience.” I know about sorority, I know about an all-women world. They’re not things we wish we were living. People are telling me, “Oh, your film is a utopia.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but our utopias are not ideas we have in our minds. This is such a powerful image, and it’s so easy to make. I see it as a really great dynamic for creating and also very fun visually.įor instance, ask yourself the question of “how do you embody sorority?” The answer being, a long take, a wide shot, of three women in the kitchen with social hierarchy being totally turned around, with the aristocratic women cooking, whereas the maid is an artist and the artist is looking at the maid.
To embody ideas that matter a lot to myself, but also to a lot of people. But also, there are so many opportunities to be playful. They are such powerful images, and they are so not seen. I see this as such a strong opportunity to make new stuff, new images, new narratives. I see as a manifesto about the female gaze. How did you build that into the film at every level? Céline Sciamma
Portrait of a lady on fire movie#
I haven’t seen a movie capture that in quite the way this one does. This movie is so good at using the camera to relay the ways that women watch each other, or the way they look at things they want. Amy Sussman/Getty Images for BAFTA LA Emily VanDerWerff Céline Sciamma (center) attends the BAFTA Tea Party with Portrait of a Lady on Fire stars Adèle Haenel (left) and Noémie Merlant.
It’s been lightly edited for length and clarity. ( Portrait was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film there but lost to Parasite.) Our conversation ranged all over the map, from lighting rigs to Greek myths. There’s lots to talk about with Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is why I was so glad to speak with Sciamma when she visited Los Angeles (for the first time ever, she said) to attend the Golden Globes. Whole scenes are lit seemingly entirely by fireplaces or candles, and Sciamma’s camera crew had to invent new methods of lighting scenes just to get the images the director wanted. It’s also quietly radical in the way it uses digital cameras to depict the past, allowing for the capturing of images in lower light levels than would have been possible with more traditional methods. This is a classic love story, but one that hides considerable political depths. At one point when we spoke, Sciamma said she thought a lot about the movie Titanic while making her own film, and it shows. The movie is quietly radical in its gender and class politics, but it’s also wholly approachable. But in the story of the budding romance between Héloïse (the aforementioned aristocrat) and Marianne (the woman who will paint her portrait), Sciamma found a way to talk about so much of the history that usually is left on the cutting room floor, of the women and queer people of the past who are too often pushed to the edges of the stories we tell about times long gone. Sciamma’s unique talent for capturing the lives of women who are rarely placed at the center of cinematic stories might not seem to be a particularly strong fit for a period piece about an aristocratic woman dreading her impending marriage. Few movies have ever hit me as hard as Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the new film from French director Céline Sciamma.