Portrait of a young woman on fire

Movie
German title	Portrait of a young woman on fire
Original title	Portrait de la jeune fille en feu
Country of production	France
original language	French
Publishing year	2019
length	122 minutes
Age rating	FSK 12
Rod
Director	Celine Sciamma
script	Celine Sciamma
production	Véronique Cayla , ; Bénédicte Couvreur
music	Jean-Baptiste de Laubier , ; Arthur Simonini
camera	Claire Mathon
cut	Julien Lacheray
occupation
	Noémie Merlant : Marianne; Adèle Haenel : Héloïse; Luàna Bajrami : Sophie; Valeria Golino : Countess;

Portrait of a young woman in flames (original title Portrait de la jeune fille en feu , English-language festival title: Portrait of a Lady on Fire ) is a French fiction film by Celine Sciamma from 2019 . The drama takes place in the 18th century and focuses on a painter, played by Noémie Merlant , who is commissioned to secretly create the wedding portrait of a noble woman, played by Adèle Haenel , who is resisting a marriage. The more time the two young women spend together, the more they feel drawn to each other.

The film premiered on May 19, 2019 in competition at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival . A theatrical release in France took place on September 18, 2019, in Germany on October 31, 2019.

action

France, in 1770: the young painter Marianne travels to a remote island in Brittany . She has received an order from a widowed Italian countess to make a portrait of her daughter Héloïse. The young woman is to be married to a nobleman from Milan and the painting is supposed to seal the bond between the two. The rebellious Héloïse, who was taken from the convent after the mysterious death of her sister to take her place, refuses to marry and to be a model for a picture. After the last painter left without having achieved anything, Marianne followed a suggestion from the Countess and pretended to be a companion. During walks together on the beach and on the cliffs, she is supposed to study Héloïse in secret and then capture it from memory on the canvas.

She tries to see enough of her to be able to capture and express her essence in an image. When the portrait is finished, it shows Marianne Héloïse. The surprised Héloïse expresses herself devastatingly about the conventionally designed painting and doubts that Marianne ever saw her correctly. The deeply affected Marianne then destroys the still damp oil painting.

When the countess decides to send Marianne away, Héloïse surprisingly agrees to sit as a model for her. The two women approach each other a second time and spend a few carefree days together in the absence of Héloïse's mother. They develop a friendship with the maid Sophie, who they support with an abortion. When she begins to see Héloïse through the eyes of a lover, what she can bring to the screen also changes, and the more time Marianne spends with Héloïse, the more the two women feel drawn to each other. Meanwhile, Héloïse learns from Marianne that female painters are not allowed to practice on male nudes. She then suggests recreating the abortion scene with Sophie, which Marianne puts on paper with sketches.

The closer the two women get, the more Marianne's portrayal of her lover changes. She even manages to capture Héloïse's mysterious smile on the canvas. In the end, the two women have to separate. Héloïse is married to Milan as planned. Marianne later earned her living working as a drawing teacher for women. She meets Marianne again indirectly in the context of an exhibition and most recently at a concert in the opera, where Vivaldi's Four Seasons can be heard. She brought an unusual portrayal of Orpheus and Eurydice into the exhibition, a myth that is referred to again and again during the action in the film.

production

History of origin

With a portrait of a young woman in flames , Celine Sciamma made her fourth feature film, for which she also wrote the screenplay. In preparation for the script, she spent two years studying the female artist movement in the 18th century and also consulted an art sociologist in order to draw the figure of Marianne as authentically as possible for the time.

She had previously worked on a youth film trilogy with Water Lilies (2007), Tomboy (2011) and Mädchenbande (2014) , in which she explored questions of femininity and gender, she wanted to capture an “adult feeling” with her new film . Sciamma described the greatest challenge as capturing the "intimate aspect" of the story. She also worked for the first time with professional actors, including Adèle Haenel , who she had made known with Water Lilies .

The film received a production grant from the Région Île-de-France amounting to 380,000 euros and a further grant from the Center national de la cinématographie .

Filming, production design and costumes

The shooting took place on the Quiberon peninsula , on the Côte sauvage

The film was shot within 34 days in autumn 2018 on the Quiberon peninsula , in Brittany in the Morbihan department . Among other things, photos were taken on the Côte sauvage, on the Atlantic side with small sandy beaches between the rocky bays of Port Blanc and Port Bara . Claire Mathon acted as camerawoman .

The set was created by Thomas Grézaud , with whom Sciamma has already worked for tomboy and girl gang . Dorothee Guiraud acted as costume designer .

The portraits were created by the painter Hélène Delmaire, who also acted as a hand-double for Noémie Merlant.

Film music and sound design

The film music was composed by Jean-Baptiste de Laubier , who also created the music for tomboy and gang of girls , and Arthur Simonini , who was also involved in the work of the latter. Leslie Felperin of The Hollywood Reporter notes that in the film two pieces of music appear strategically distributed to intensify a soundscape that otherwise consists only of natural sounds, silence and the sighs of lovers. One is a strange a cappella version, which is initially sung almost atonally by the women and then merges into an intense choral work. The other is an excerpt from Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons , played once in the middle of the film by Marianne on a harpsichord to please Héloïse. This will be repeated at the end, so Felperin, where it merges with a long tracking shot that casts Héloïse under her spell when she experiences a storm of emotions that follows the musical storm that she hears. This is literally a real bang and shows in a moment how a woman experiences cathartic feelings while listening to classical music.

Publication and film rights

The historical drama was shown for the first time on May 19, 2019 as part of the Cannes International Film Festival and competed there in the competition for the Palme d'Or . Here, Neon (cinema) and Hulu (online evaluation) secured the distribution rights for North America after a bidding competition with Sony Pictures Classics and Netflix . In August 2019 it was presented at the Melbourne International Film Festival. In late July and early August 2019 it was shown at the Jerusalem Film Festival . In September 2019, the film will be shown at the Toronto International Film Festival as part of the Special Presentations and in the same month as part of the Leipzig Film Art Fair and at the Festival Internacional de Cine de San Sebastián in the Perlak section. At the end of September and beginning of October 2019 it will be shown at the Zurich Film Festival , the New York Film Festival and the Hamburg Film Festival . At the beginning of October 2019 it will be presented at the London Film Festival and afterwards at the Film Festival Cologne . A theatrical release in France took place on September 18, 2019, in Germany on October 31, 2019 and in the USA on December 6, 2019. The first German trailer was presented at the beginning of September 2019.

reception

Adèle Haenel took on the role of Héloïse

Age rating

In Germany, the film was approved by the FSK from the age of 12. The statement of reasons for the release states that scenes dealing with topics such as sex , abortion or suicide are staged with restraint and are often only hinted at in dialogues.

International and French criticism

On the Rotten Tomatoes website , the film was able to convince almost all critics and received an average rating of 9 out of a possible 10 points. On the Metacritic website , all film reviews that have been given so far have received positive ratings and Portrait of a Young Woman on Fire received 92 out of a possible 100 percent. Sciamma's directorial work was one of the favorites for the Palme d'Or , the main prize of the Cannes Film Festival, and received 3.3 out of 4 stars in the international review of the British trade magazine Screen International . In a purely French review of the website Le film français , only 2 out of 15 critics (Pierre Vavasseur, Le Parisien ; Samuel Douhain, Telerama ) saw the film as a palm tree favorite.

Noémie Merlant plays the role of Marianne

Véronique Cauhapé ( Le Monde ) noticed that Sciamma would not have given up her previous themes as a filmmaker with this “precise, fluid” staged film, despite the change of epoch and scenery. On the contrary, underlines the perspective of the 18th century, "what remains or what has changed, what women were exposed to by the law of men and how they sometimes came to circumvent it," says Cauhapé. Sciamma uses modern accents to keep the viewer awake.

Elisabeth Franck-Dumas ( Liberation ) , to her own surprise, felt reminded of the work of Charlotte Brontë and compared the figure of Marianne with that of Jane Eyre . Marianne is one of the most beautiful characters at the film festival and is embodied by Noémie Merlant "with a crazy precision [...] with big eyes full of intelligence and desire" . Franck-Dumas divided the film into two parts, a first, somewhat “academic” part, which revolves around the portrait of Héloïse, and a second, more exciting part, which changes to Marianne. This takes on "the artist as a young woman". Marianne “explains the art, frees herself from imposed rules, looks at her model at eye level,” says Franck-Dumas. She highlighted the camera and noticed "a game of mirrors, a series of looks" that fall back on the viewer.

Françoise Dargent ( Le Figaro ) gave the film a more critical review , praising it for its “beautiful idea”, but also attesting it to be “awkward”. She criticized, among other things, that the film tries to reveal too many aspects of the "condition féminine". The dialogues between the two main characters and the erotic tension when standing as a model are also not exploited. Dargent missed a “bolder”, “bolder” approach in Sciamma's first costume film.

German language criticism

After the premiere in Cannes, critics of the leading German-language media were consistently impressed by Sciamma's historical drama.

According to Verena Lueken ( Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ), the film tells the "story of a great love as liberation [...] and at the same time a piece of art history in a very idiosyncratic way". She particularly emphasized the scenes of abortion and the mock abortion and praised the portrait of a young woman on fire as the opposite of the cinematic aesthetics of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (“[...] maybe it doesn't take a man's body and less woman 's butt to make great art to accomplish"). Later Lueken Sciamma's directorial work, together with Pedro Almodóvar's Sorrow and Glory and the later palm-winner Parasite, was one of the favorites for the main prize of the film festival, and Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel included chances of winning the actor's award .

Katja Nicodemus ( Die Zeit ) was the only German member of Screen International's international critics to give Portrait of a Young Woman in Flames the highest possible rating (the only film besides Almodóvar's Sorrow and Glory ). In her opinion, "a film has rarely questioned the act of artistic representation so cleverly, so delicately, so poignantly". Sciamma's directorial work is a “wonderfully unconsumed costume film”. At the same time, she makes the viewer accomplices in Marianne's view of Héloïse, "who does not expect to be reciprocated".

Valeria Golino , here at the premiere of the film in Cannes in May 2019 , plays the Countess

Hannah Pilarczyk ( Spiegel Online ) wrote that how looks and desire are related is the big topic of cinema. Under the catchphrase “male gaze”, the extent to which male looks and male desire have shaped film history has been discussed again and again. With the film, Celine Sciamma takes up these discussions and, to a certain extent, reenacts them with her characters. In her review, Pilarczyk also refers to the essay A Room to Yourself by Virginia Woolf , in which the author once argued that women need a self-determined retreat in order to develop their true creative potential. Sciamma now provides glorious proof of how important a film can be on its own.

Dominik Kamalzadeh ( Der Standard ) praised Sciamma together with Mati Diop ( Atlantique ) for bringing “new vigor” to the Cannes competition with their films. The director went on the offensive with a “ gender-politically twisted view against the historical film” and was “inventive in exploring the fine shifts in the relationship between two women”. “Sciamma not only shows how an act of representation brings things out of balance; Her film has its strongest moments when it creates a female utopia on a Breton island in 1770. Two women with a maid who completely negate social role models, ”says Kamalzadeh.

Peter Osteried from the Gilde deutscher Filmkunsttheater describes portrait of a young woman in flames as a deliberately slow film that offers beautiful landscape shots of rough coasts. What Sciamma delivers here is an exercise in slowness, a two hour long film that is the equivalent of a portrait session. The film transfers the sitting still of those to be portrayed to the viewer, and if one has ever toyed with the thought of withdrawing from life, experiencing a spiritual break or withdrawal from the familiar surroundings, then this film is what is probably most important about it comes next because it's so quiet and inconspicuous. Osteried describes the background music as subtle and almost never attracts attention, which means that the film completely ignores the emotional effects of music, right up to what is perhaps the most beautiful, and also most tragic, scene of the film, which comes to the end and takes place in an opera.

The jury of the Protestant film work recommends Portrait of a Young Woman in Flames as Film of the Month October 2019.

Awards (selection)

Portrait of a young woman on fire made it to the shortlist as an official French entry for an Oscar nomination in the category Best International Film together with Die Wütenden - Les Misérables and Proxima .

The following is a selection of other awards and nominations:

British Independent Film Awards 2019