Portrait of a Lady on Fire

What is Portrait of a Lady on Fire about?

On an island in eighteenth-century Brittany, a painter named Marianne is hired to paint Héloïse, a young woman just out of a convent and promised to a Milanese nobleman she has never met. Héloïse refuses to sit, so Marianne is told to pose as a walking companion and paint her in secret, from memory, at night. Céline Sciamma turns that setup into a film about looking: who is allowed to look, what looking does to the person being looked at, and what changes when both women are doing it. There are no men in any meaningful sense, and you feel the absence as a kind of oxygen. The film is also about the deal women were offered by that century, and about what art is for when a life cannot be kept. The last shot, at a concert, is a full sob, and it is earned by two hours of restraint.

Nobody is watched by a man in this film, and you feel the difference in your body. The last shot is a full sob.