Friday, March 6, 2020

Nosh 187: Portrait of a Lady on Fire & More

David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER (Review of Portrait of a Lady on Fire)




Inevitably sold in this country as a “lesbian romance,” Portrait of a Lady on Fire is so clearly a French art film of complex ambition that you wonder how much of it will be absorbed by prurient peepers. There is some informal and tender nudity, but the sexuality is in the pervasive, pensive sensuality that begins to build at the start. Maybe it was to deflect such shallow voyeurism that the English title female is a “lady” instead of a “young girl” (the French title is Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, a variant on the more familiar jeune fille en fleur, young girl flowering).Well, vive les nuances, because they are the essence, manner and method of one of the most elegant movies of recent years.

Céline Sciamma, the director and writer whose previous work centers on young, modern girls and women, has by all accounts found her finest platform, by going to the late 18th century (not very late; no mention of the Revolution or Napoleon). She has re-imagined it as a stylized feminist idyll of discovery, though “feminist” doesn’t exist for these women. Héloise (Adele Haenel) is brought home to a seaside villa from a convent, to replace her recently dead (likely suicide) sister, who went over a nearby cliff before an arranged marriage. Her mother, the widowed Comtesse (Valeria Golino, a long way from her young work in Big Top Pee-wee), is the arranger. She wanted to marry the lass to a Milanese nobleman so that she, an Italian, can return home in high style.

Now Héloise returns home, ordered to marry the unseen foreigner who expects an oil portrait that will ratify his choice. The sister’s male painter departed in haste, leaving the portrait’s face as a smeary remnant of loss, rage or ineptitude. His replacement is Marianne (Noémie Merlant), daughter of a painter, herself a very talented artist and art teacher, but as a woman denied access by the art patriarchy to male nude models, crucial to major Salon themes. Héloise, who misses her convent so free of males (few appear in the story), fears marriage and refuses to pose. But shyly, slyly she opens to Marianne, who at first sketches her covertly. The home’s large, spare rooms (evidence of fading income?) are like canvases, with the story seemingly painted into place by the impeccable brush strokes of glances, moods and confidential talk. This is the most exquisite vision of the era since Eric Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke (2001), which created revolutionary Paris with wonderful painted and digital backdrops.

The deepening suspense is the testing intimacy between the women through shared intelligence and longing. Cinematographer Clair Mathon embraces them in a chiaroscuro from fireplaces and candles, in fine fabrics both actual and painted, all beautifully composed. Even with talk about the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, the liaison is never bloodless and seems to anticipate Romanticism. Merlant’s Marianne has an advantage. More arrestingly pretty with her dark, piercing eyes, she gets to paint, and thrill Héloise by playing Vivaldi on a spinet. Haenel, however, projects more mystery and yearning. Their visits to the sea seem to evoke the future beach vistas of Courbet, Corot and Monet. Sciamma doesn’t need to emphasize sex, because her movie is a pulsing tapestry of quietly erotic touches, clues and portents.

At times we notice the educated French urge to map out feelings as concepts. Some dialog emits a parfum analytique de Sorbonne, like “In solitude I feel the liberty you speak of, but I also feel your absence.” The silences feel loaded with thought. The sequence of the two women helping their charming little servant find an abortion, using the folk wisdom of peasant women, seems rather imported, to add a more modern social solidarity and feminist urgency to the story. Still, you can’t blame the French for being French, and the lesbian romantic theme is so deeply sensitive and exquisitely poignant that only a clod would not be moved. There is a wistful double coda, one at the official Salon in Paris, and one at an orchestral concert that pushes the emotional pedal. But who can complain about hearing Vivaldi again?     

SALAD: A List

 

12 Major Performances by French Women in French Films
Each is indisputably special (with director, year):
Marie Falconetti as Jeanne in Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Dreyer 1928), Jeanne Moreau as Catherine in Jules et Jim (Truffaut 1963), Juliette Binoche as Julie in Three Colors: Blue (Kieslowski 1993), Simone Signoret as Marie in Casque d’Or (Becker 1952), Anna Karina as Nana (photo above) in Vivre Sa Vie (Godard 1962), Isabelle Adjani as Adele Hugo in Histoire de Adele H. (Truffaut 1975), Catherine Deneuve as Severine in Belle de Jour (Buñuel 1967), Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose (Dahan 2007), Arletty as Garance in Les Enfants de Paradis (Carné 1945), Maria Schneider as Jeanne in Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci 1972), Dita Parlo as Odile in L’Atalante (Vigo 1934) and little Catherine Demongeot as Zazie, seen in the photo below from Zazie dans le Métro (Malle 1960).  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
For Orson Welles, the supreme French director was Jean Renoir (and he was right). Here is a taste of his 1979 obituary salute to Renoir in the Los Angeles Times: “It’s safe to say that the owners of Pierre Auguste Renoir’s paintings in Bel-Air and Beverly Hills are (mostly) connected with the movies. And it’s just as safe to say that not one of them has ever been connected with any movie comparable to the masterpieces of the painter’s son Jean. Some of these were commercial and even, in their time, critical failures. Some enjoyed success. None were blockbusters. Many were immortal.” (From This Is Orson Welles, by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Funny Face (1957) is not a great French movie – it isn’t even French – but it has the most joyous salute to tourist Paris. After arriving at Orly airport, Americans Jo (Audrey Hepburn), Dick (Fred Astaire) and Maggie (Kay Thompson) “separately invade 38 sites, their lyrics landing in giddy, overlapping rhythm at Les Invalides, Notre Dame, Sacré Couer, Versailles, St. Cloud, etc. Jo cheerfully informs the Left Bank that ‘I want to philosophize with all the guys, around Montmartre.” In musical sync each pilgrim intuits the obligatory finale, uniting at the Eiffel Tower: ‘We’re strictly tourists, you can chatter and jeer / All we want to say is Lafayette we are here – bonjour, Paris!” (From the Hepburn/Funny Face chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.) 

DESSERT (An Image)


As Zazie, Parisian scamp of Zazie dans le Métro, Catherine Demongeot became a vanguard mascot of the French New Wave and its impudent energies. Seen here with co-star Philippe Noiret (Pathé 1960; director Louis Malle, d.p. Henri Raichi).

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