Emma Wilson, 'Céline Sciamma, Portraits'
Emma Wilson, 'Céline Sciamma, Portraits'
Emma Wilson, 'Céline Sciamma, Portraits'
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List of figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
1. Introduction: portraits 1
2. Water Lilies 25
3. Tomboy 43
4. Girlhood 62
5. Portrait of a Lady on Fire 86
Bibliography 112
Filmography 120
Index 124
Introduction: portraits
Sciamma
Domination
chosen but undergone, and she sees her choice to speak out as
an act of solidarity with other victims of abuse.20 Garcia’s work
on submission and subjugation allows the continuities between
becoming a woman, and being looked at and objectified under
patriarchy, and being subjected to abuse and violence, to come
to light. Sciamma’s work does not draw directly from Haenel’s
experience, but exists as an artistic reflection on, and vision of,
survival beyond the girlhood narratives that Haenel and others
are making public.
Sciamma’s work also moves beyond Garcia to consider non-
binary identities, that of a trans boy, as well as those of girls and
young women. For Sciamma’s critique of patriarchy, and her
embrace of non-binary identities, the work of Paul B. Preciado is
revelatory and in line with Garcia.21 In Je suis un monstre qui vous
parle [I am a monster who is talking to you] (2020b), Preciado
also thinks about patriarchy and subjugation, arguing that a
feminist and queer rereading of the Oedipus complex according
to Freud is urgently needed.22 Showing the ways in which psy-
choanalysis has failed to listen to, and account for, queer desires
and non-binary being in the world, he specifically critiques the
reading of incestuous desire in Freud, which is, for Preciado, a
patriarchal crime:
rethink the visual, beauty, and pleasure. This is how she looks
for a means of refusing objectification and so ending a regime of
domination.27
Inclinations
for her, reclining or lying prone. She thinks about the politically
charged adoption of lying down in contemporary works.
Khurana’s performance Lying-down-on-the-ground (2006–12), in
Pollock’s reading, draws out intense emotions:
Lying down ‘speaks’ the weight of the trauma of psycho-
logical dereliction in the pathos of that act of giving way,
desiring the support of bare earth or hard ground, or giving
into a wish to escape into unconsciousness or sleep that
might also feel like death. (Pollock 2018: n.p.)
For Pollock, the story and pose of Sleeping Beauty ‘represents the
imposed passivity of women in patriarchal culture’ (2018: n.p.).
She finds in the work of the artists she examines a different energy
and aim. She writes: ‘Sometimes we place our bodies nakedly and
vulnerably in the world of history or in the landscapes of memory’
(2018: n.p.). Pollock draws attention to possible reactivating and
transforming of meanings, in repeating and shifting poses and
gestures, moves and shapes.
In her different feminist art historical practice, Mavor gathers
images with startling emotive, sensory, and formal connections,
in a Proustian way letting links be apprehended by intuition, by
sudden shock, by involuntary memory. Mavor juxtaposes words
and images in her projects, telling stories and letting a dissolving
sweep of images mesmerise the viewer. For Mavor, artworks,
the field of the visual, hold sometimes unspeakable, intense, and
bruising feelings, grief, an erotic charge, regression, joy. She is
attentive to colour, texture, surface, the transparent, the glassy, the
diaphanous. Her range of images, visual and verbal, by women
artists, runs from Julia Margaret Cameron’s sensual images,
dreamy, ‘otherworldly’, of children, to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest
Eye (1970), Carrie Mae Weems’s Blue Black Boy (1997), and
Colette conjuring a memory of a field of blue wildflowers she saw
as a girl. Mavor’s work, like Sciamma’s, is attentive to the sensorium
of children, and connects this, through art, to adult consciousness.
As a filmmaker Sciamma has recourse to movement and
changing angles of vision in her artworks. As a feminist, post
on the green lawn. The moment of love is lost. But it was present
in the dance, with manic joy.
Flashforward a decade or two to Sciamma’s films. There is the
first love of Water Lilies with its parties and dancing. There is the
interpolation of Mickäel in Tomboy where, with Lisa, he can exist,
miraculously, as a boy. Like Akerman, Sciamma is a director who
needs very few words to conjure feeling. Sciamma’s directing of
actors, her understanding of gesture and mood, are enough to
allow the moving images to hold pathos and meaning. Akerman
shows multiple shifting images of Michelle in her striped shirt,
her dark hair tied back, and Sciamma likewise returns to the girls
she films, showing them always different, catching minute shifts
in response, thought, and feeling. Sciamma follows Akerman in
her attention to the intensity, grief, and elation of growing up.
Sciamma moves forwards with these emotions. If for Akerman
this is about existence, opening to the world, Sciamma is more
focused on a clear, and liberatory, political agenda.
Scopophilia
the director at her subjects, the look of the viewer at the films.
This is beyond and despite her feminist recognition of the relation
between looking, objectification, and subjugation. This is indeed
one of the interesting tensions of her projects. Sciamma’s work
explores ways in which looking may no longer impose a gendered
binary of activity and passivity. Looking and being looked at are
collaborative, shifting, unfixed. As in Goldin’s Scopophilia, female
beauty, desire in looking, are seen differently, in a fluid, queer
domain of pleasure. Sciamma’s work, like Goldin’s, depends on a
certain alchemy, closeness and trust, where the artist’s consensual
intimacy with her subjects is part of the process of imaging.
Sciamma makes art that opens the range of images of children
cis and trans, young girls, and women, looking, and looked at,
existing in the world.34 As I write she is working on a new project,
Petite Maman, which will for sure extend this range, and confirm
her unique position still further.
Notes
1 ‘une manière de questionner autrement le rapport de création entre celui
qui regarde et celui qui est regardé’. Translations from the French are mine
unless otherwise stated.
2 Sciamma has a cameo, as a server in McDonald’s, in her first film.
3 In September 2012 Cahiers du cinéma devoted an issue to women
filmmakers, since no films by women directors were in competition at
Cannes that summer. Céline Sciamma’s interview stands out. She argues
that women’s cinema is an issue not of aesthetics, but of politics. See
Sciamma (2012: 25). In the words of So Mayer: ‘Céline Sciamma is the
most exciting thing to happen to French cinema since Catherine Breillat’s
Romance (1999) definitively blew up le cinéma du papa’ (2015: n.p.).
4 This is also the town where writer Annie Ernaux lives. Ernaux too has done
much to represent class mobility and the lives of women and girls.
5 See Garbarz and Martinez (2014) for further details about Sciamma’s
studies before film school.
6 This was Téchiné’s first film with an original screenplay since Les Témoins
[The Witnesses] (2007). Sciamma has talked about how important Téchiné
was to her cinephile formation when she first saw his major films in her
teens (Gilson 2016). She has said that Téchiné came to her for two reasons:
25 ‘Cela fait plus de six ans que j’ai abandonné le statut juridique et politique
de femme. Un temps peut-être court quand on le considère installé dans le
confort assourdissant de l’identité normative, mais infiniment long quand
tout ce qui a été appris dans l’enfance doit être désappris.’
26 Few such moments have been filmed by women directors in France.
(Catherine Corsini’s La Belle Saison [Summertime] (2015) is an exception
as a complex love story between women.)
27 After Portrait of a Lady on Fire was screened at Cannes, Sciamma was
interviewed by Iris Brey for the series of podcasts ‘She Cannes’ (Sciamma
2019). She speaks about equality being the project of her work, about her
awareness of inequalities in the industry, and about her aims to represent
love and sex between women in new ways. She sees this as her twelve-year
project to date, and one where she is changing and challenging herself. She
looks to think beyond submission and power relations, in looking, and in
representations of love and sex, seeking other sensations and pleasures.
28 Cavarero has been important for Judith Butler’s work in Giving an Account
of Oneself (2005). Butler has engaged with Cavarero’s work Relating
Narratives (2000) also about dependencies, exposures, thinking about
how our own opacity and unknowing can be the basis of relationality.
29 A model is found in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with St Anne
(1503–19) where the Madonna bends down towards the Christ child. For
Cavarero, ‘Leonardo’s painting gives the meaning of maternal inclination a
special ethical density and a neat geometric linearity’ (2016: 99).
30 As Pollock explains, the notion of a ‘pathos formula’ is drawn from Aby
Warburg: ‘For Warburg, images are dynamic modes of the transmission of
affects. Hence they are formulae for intensity, suffering, abjection, ecstasy,
and transformation’ (2018: n.p.).
31 Speaking about the coming-of-age story in Girlhood, Sciamma comments:
‘I thought of Jane Austen, of Jane Campion, of numerous stories where
a young girl wants to live her dreams, tries to free herself and comes up
against her era, her social and family setting’ (‘J’ai pensé à Jane Austen, à
Jane Campion, à de nombreux récits où une jeune fille veut vivre ses désirs,
cherche à s’émanciper et se confronte à son époque, son milieu social et sa
famille’) (Lalanne 2014: 44). See also Mayer (2015) for discussion of this
quotation.
32 Sophie Belot’s excellent article on Water Lilies (2012: 170) references
Akerman’s film and takes account of a broader range of female-authored
French films about adolescent girls.
33 The title in French, Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, also carries echoes
of Portrait de la jeune fille en fleur, so recalling Marcel Proust’s novel of
absorption in a band of young girls in love, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en
fleur [In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower]. In its English translation,
Sciamma’s title seems to look out to Henry James’s novel of female destiny,
The Portrait of a Lady, adapted for the cinema by Jane Campion as a work
of feminist costume drama in 1996.
34 She says in interview that there is ‘the political wish to represent girls,
to go into their private worlds, to go into things that are fantasmatic and
clinically real all at once’ (‘la volonté politique de représenter des filles,
d’aller dans leurs coulisses, d’aller à la fois dans des choses fantasmatiques
et absolument cliniques’) (Garbarz and Martinez 2014: 26).
Water Lilies
Swimming pools
for directors such as Gus van Sant and Larry Clark, as well as the
influence of a filmmaker such as Noémie Lvovsky, whose work
shifted cinematic representations of French girls (Lalanne 2007).
Water Lilies is engaged with rapture and transformation.
It shows the bruising intensity and gloss of unrequited love,
the surface pressure in the blossoming of sexual feeling.3 It is
saturated, bathed in feeling, newly attentive to girls’ sensations,
its sensorium minutely adjusted to its subject. The space of
the municipal pool, with its chlorinated water and bleached,
white-tiled surfaces, is a reservoir for the flowering of adolescent
girls’ eroticism. The public leisure space of the swimming pool is
adopted as the stage, the locale, for the film. Sciamma focuses in
on intimate relations and observes their propagation in a sterile,
showy, wet, public arena.
The pool where Sciamma films is at Cergy-Pontoise in the région
parisienne. Sciamma’s films reference Eric Rohmer’s attention to
the friendships of young girls and in real world environments, often
new town and suburban spaces around Paris. In My Girlfriend’s
Boyfriend, which shows the Cergy pool, Blanche (Emmanuelle
Chaulet) gives her new friend Lea swimming lessons. Sciamma’s
film combines an allusion to Rohmer, documentary realism – this
is the town where she grew up – and heightened sense impressions,
through a play of colour and light.4
Water Lilies opens in the changing rooms of the pool. The camera,
at girl height, circles among the swimmers as they dress for their
contest, the music of the soundtrack creating a mesmeric effect. The
girls rehearse the gestures that will form their aquatic performance.
The details here of costume and moves, and intimacy of the shots,
are striking. The film’s spectacle is foreshadowed, trailed, in this
sequence, the light in the changing rooms already anticipating the
unreal setting of the pool. Marie, outside, enters the viewing arena
where she will find a seat to watch the show. The pool is seen from
her angle of vision.5 The spandex-clad girls emerge in luminous
green with sequins and stylised scarlet leaves on their suits.
The first shot of the pool is a beautiful photographic set piece.6
The water is gleaming turquoise with reflected rose and mauve
light in the room. The performers walk in line along the poolside
silhouetted against the pink-lit walls and reflected in the pool
surface. The appeal of the sequence is heightened by movement,
as the girls move gracefully in synchronised sequence along the
edge. It is not only the image but its serial motion that captures
the eye. The scene unfurls like an early motion study.
In the first performance there are three small girls in glistening
water, just their heads above the surface. They are like tiny
nymphs. Their performance is very brief, rudimentary, a prelude
to the performances of the older teams. Water Lilies is not a film
of sporting spectacle, and it does not have extended swimming
sequences.7 It is rather a film of mood and feeling, of the lustre
that can coat the most quotidian, banal locations. Its adventures
are primarily affective.
The film turns from the pool to the domestic bathroom, where
Marie, in bathwater, is with her pet miniature turtle, a living
creature whose dark prehensile moves contrast with the shining
artifice of the pool arena. The white enamel of the bath is seen
with Marie’s limbs outstretched and the tiny turtle swimming.
She practises the moves of the synchronised swimmers, her
limbs appearing behind a clear fuchsia shower curtain, recalling
the colours of the poolside. The film cuts from this bathroom
setting to an external shot of the pool. Marie goes to ask if she
can sign up for synchronised swimming. The private space of
the domestic bathroom becomes a rehearsal space for the public
arena of desire.8
Jennifer Barker (2008) has explored the relay between the
senses in moments of cinematic excess, drawing on the Silencio
scene in Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), a film Sciamma
has cited as one of her favourites.9 Barker draws on Steve Connor
(2004), saying ‘the senses form an indefinite series of integrations
and transformations: they form a complexion’ (2008: 238).
For Barker, following Connor, ‘moments of cinematic, sensory
“excess” are sensual reminders of the degree to which vision is
entangled with other senses’ (2008: 251). In this mix, Sciamma
explores further the way longing heightens sense perception, so
play between the abrasive and the soft, the clean and the abject.
The spectacle of first love that emerges, from the pool forwards, is
one of intermittence, of hurt and radiance. The sting of chlorine
is in the film. Love is shown to be lush and seering. Its intrusions
and shape-shifting are part of the intimacy explored.
Mythologies
applaud. Floriane, out the water, walks on the poolside to join the
line of her swim team as their names are read out. Hers is read last.
As the name Floriane is heard, she and the girls raise their hands
and wave. She waves again, darling, princess, and home-coming
queen. The synchronised swimming shots are surpassed by these
still and moving portraits of Haenel where Sciamma captures the
actress’s charisma and photogénie, harnessing them as Marie falls
in love. In Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses the goddess Venus
says: ‘I, too, have some influence with the sea, for I was once
fashioned from foam, in its divine depths’ (1955: 108). In Water
Lilies Floriane seems to emerge and take shape out of the foam
of the moving water. She comes up pristine, wet, newly born as a
love object.
In her attention to activity and sensation both above and below
the surface of the water, Sciamma also recalls stories of naiads,
water nymphs in Ovid. As well as the birth of Venus, Book IV of
the Metamorphoses contains a myth of the origin of coral. Warrior
Perseus beheads the Gorgon Medusa (a winged female monster
with snakes for hair). Her severed head still has the power to turn
whoever looks at it to stone. The touch of her head on living weed
in the sea is enough to transform it: ‘hardening at the touch of the
head, it acquired a strange new rigidity in its leaves and branches’
(1955: 114). The text continues:
The sea nymphs tested this miracle, trying it on several
twigs, and were delighted to find the same thing
happening again. By scattering seeds from these plants
over the waves, they produced more of the substance.
Even today coral retains this same nature, hardening at
the touch of air: that which was a plant when under the
water becomes rock when brought above the surface.
(Ovid 1955: 114)
the surface. The myth draws attention to the repeated trial of this
miracle by the sea nymphs.
Julia Kristeva has offered a reading of this passage. She notes:
‘Ovid insists upon the petrification of the plants that Medusa’s
blood transforms into coral’ (2012: 29). Playing with the word,
she speculates: ‘The generic word coral could come from core [in
Greek] which means “young girl”, like Medusa; or it might be an
allusion to Coré-Persephone, the queen of the dead, to whom the
severed head of the Gorgon belongs . . .’ (2012: 29). Her argument
runs that this is a drama of the ambivalence of mother–child
separation. She says of Medusa, ‘this slimy head, surrounded by
coiled snake hair, evokes the female sexual organ – the maternal
vulva that terrifies the young boy’ (2012: 29). Medusa, this figure
of castration, only becomes bearable as icon. She is abject in her
slime, reminding the boy viewer afraid of the female genitals of
‘that archaic nondifferentiation in which there is neither subject
nor object, only the sticky, slimy ab-ject’ (2012: 31).
Water Lilies, with the reference to a slippery sea creature in
the title in French Naissance des pieuvres (meaning literally ‘the
birth of the octopuses’), takes us from octopus to jellyfish, from
pieuvre to méduse, from the birth (naissance) of Venus to the
state-changing power and horror of Medusa.13 But Sciamma,
beyond Kristeva, thinks female anatomy and sexuality outside
a heterosexual dyad and familial frame. She explores the
fascination, sensuality and tremor, or girls’ desire for each other,
and the shifting fear and emotion around this. The mother is
out of the frame (there are almost no adult characters in Water
Lilies). The girls are in the pool alone, as Sciamma rewrites origin
myths to fit girl on girl love.
Ovid’s nymphs, metamorphic young girls, recalling core, the
Greek for young girl, and playing with coral, look forward to
the scintillating swimmers of Sciamma’s film. Corals are not
weed as Ovid, and Kristeva, suggest. They are marine animals
and they respond to touch. The miraculous transformations of
the coral, the sensory rupture in the move from living organism
to petrified skeleton, are recalled in a series of sense patterns
in Sciamma’s film which play out the testing of hard and soft,
abrasion and caress.14
In its initial attention to the spectacle and accessories of
synchronised swimming, the film creates a gritty, abrasive
aesthetic.15 It yields brittle, coruscating sense impressions, where
distorted sounds, and patterns of glittering light on the azure
pool, match the girls’ sequined swimsuits, sprung nose-clips,
and gel-slicked hair.16 Sensual and athletic bodies are seen being
exercised, depilated, coated, lacquered. But as Marie also swims
underwater in the film, she glimpses a liquid world of headless,
swirling, moving bodies, thighs, skin, and spandex fabric.
Sciamma reimagines immemorial images of naiads, of swimming
girls, of metamorphosis, that speak to the intensity of adolescence
and the new strangeness of erotic awakening.17
Hurt
These are the issues Sciamma reflects on, allowing a space for
thought and feeling about skin and flesh exposed to the gaze,
and also to touch, and violence. As for Butler, so for Sciamma,
recognition of the body’s exposure is part of a feminist politics
that attends to pathos and hurt. Sciamma shows how women
and girls can also hurt each other. Attention to singular bodies,
their sensory loveliness, their strength, and their susceptibility to
damage, to the full gamut of bodily feelings, risks, and violations,
Hymen
Sciamma’s specific originality and innovation are visible above
all in Water Lilies in the film’s sex scene between Floriane and
Marie. In an interview with Sam Ashby, she says: ‘I write scenes
that I believe haven’t been written before. In Water Lilies, one girl
is deflowering another girl without love, in a clinical way’ (Ashby
2012: 10).22 In the hyper-sexualised environment of the swim
team, Floriane is phobic and conflicted about her virginity. She
has an unmerited erotic reputation. There is an indication that
she is harassed by the coach, who insists on massaging her before
a competition. In response she invites Marie to break her hymen
so she can sleep with a boy. Floriane lies down in her suburban
bedroom and under the covers Marie enters her with her fingers.
Floriane registers pain, Haenel’s response conveying a sense of the
entry, the tear, as physical hurt. The effect for Marie is brutal. Her
sensory landmark – experiencing the vastness of the act of entering
another girl for the first time, of feeling her inside, the erotic awe,
the intact emotion – vanishes in the aftermath of Floriane’s lack of
involvement and in the immediate arrival of her boyfriend.
In this relay, Marie enters Floriane and is instantly expendable
and asked to exit. This breaks their relationship. Viewing it is
like a kick in the stomach. The scene recalls earlier instants
where Marie has been made complicit with Floriane’s dating.
Floriane toys with her, drawing Marie on a cord. She has a keen
sense of Marie’s helpless love, of her susceptibility to the liquid
spectacle in the pool. The film’s aesthetic strategy is so acute
that it charts minutely the intermittence of Floriane’s attention.
There are moments when the film itself seems lost in Marie’s love
and enchanted with Floriane’s erotic possibility. These times of
disavowal make the outcome, the break between them, the more
seismic. Sciamma does not demonise Floriane. There are times
when she is vulnerable and lovable. Instead, Sciamma shows that
for Marie, here, love feels like this.
In her poem ‘Ode to the Hymen’, Sharon Olds writes: ‘How
many places in the / body were made to be destroyed / once?’ Her
Pauline
her senses. The film is saturated with feeling. It is not fixed, and
offers no protection from fear, sliminess, the abject. It is a film
about being undone, by love and grief, about not remaining intact,
about the force and beauty of intrusion and metamorphosis. It
is a film alive to the ways in which emergent desires, and their
interruptions, entering cinema, transform its politics. Water Lilies
reaches a truce. Marie leaves Floriane behind. Sciamma waits
until her next project, a short, to film a happy ending.
Pauline (2010) was part of a commissioned project 5 Films
contre l’homophobie [5 Short Films Against Homophobia] based
on an idea (and with a script) by Daphné Charbonneau.25 It stars
Anaïs Demoustier as the eponymous Pauline. The film opens with
photographs Pauline has stuck on her wall. She explains how she
grew up in a small village with her family around. She strokes a
cat lying on the bed beside her and the camera slowly pans to the
left as she looks round. It follows her horizontal figure, reaching
her face. She explains how things began to change when she was
fifteen. She describes a feeling of nausea, something growing
inside her. The camera is still as she speaks with her head inclined,
the film offering a reclining portrait. The pose is one that is like
the therapy couch, but also casual, as if she is talking with a friend
in her bedroom. The lighting and colours of the shot, her striped
shirt, the framing, make this unobtrusively pictorial. Pauline
stares into space, and her hand slowly works away at her skin.
She dates a boy, a childhood friend, but leaves him after she
speaks about her feelings for girls. She begins to experience
taunts and suggestive comments in the village. Demoustier’s face
registers her shifting emotions. In a long take she talks and she
seems to be alone in this space, her lying down part of her sadness.
Her monologue tells of what it feels like to be rejected. After Water
Lilies, Pauline seems to look forward to Marie’s future. Pauline is
sad because her family do not protect her. She hates herself. She
feels all alone. Her parents are ashamed. So Pauline leaves. She
says she has not seen them since. It feels as if she is all alone in the
world, in the film, in the shot. But, suddenly, this shifts. She says
that maybe things will change now. Looking beyond the frame
she addresses a ‘tu’, someone she has been speaking to all along.
Adèle Haenel enters the frame, her hand reaching out to Pauline.
She is her addressee, her girlfriend. She nestles against her.
Notes
1 I would align her work with Jane Campion’s films in this regard, and in
particular the immersive and tangible environments of In the Cut (2003).
2 See Edney (2020) for a reading which explores the sonorous aspects of
the film, suggesting ‘[t]hrough memory, recognition and association, the
music in Naissance des pieuvres attaches to the girls; it is these memories
that make the soundtrack so effective for fostering links between the
spectator and the protagonists’ (2020: 290). See also McNeill (2018) on
the effect of music in Sciamma.
3 Belot also uses the term ‘blossoming’ (2012: 172) as she looks at Sciamma’s
‘lyrical yet realist re-visioning of girls’ coming-of-age’.
4 See Belot (2012: 177) for more specific discussion of Cergy-Pontoise, its
sites, and its filming by Rohmer.
5 Sciamma has said that she too had ‘a revelation on watching synchronised
swimming’ (‘une révélation en voyant de la natation synchronisée’)
(Garbarz and Martinez 2014: 26).
6 M. Catherine Jonet comments on the visual style of Water Lilies, writing:
‘she creates protracted, static shots and prolonged cinematic moments that
compel the viewer to perceive beyond external appearances. The viewer
is invited to take long, lingering glimpses and think over the adolescent
characters’ actions and choices as well as the filmic elements the narrative
presents’ (2017: 1127).
7 Clara Bradbury-Rance describes the film ‘gesturing towards the sports
genre but infusing it with the capriciousness of adolescence’ and draws
attention to the ‘dolphin-like dives of the swimmers’ (2019: 81, 85).
8 The bathroom in Tomboy is similarly a place of rehearsal of identity.
9 See her Télérama interview, ‘Céline Sciamma: Il est temps d’écrire pour soi’
[‘It is time to write for oneself ’] (Sciamma 2018), where she also reveals
that her childhood bedroom was plastered with posters of Michael Jackson.
It was viewing the documentary Leaving Neverland: Michael Jackson and Me
(Dan Reed, 2019), that inspired Haenel to speak out about her experience
of abuse (Dryef 2019).
10 Sciamma likewise offers what is for me an inception, an interpolation,
as a child is addressed as a boy in Tomboy, but other moments of trans
awareness may again predate the action of the film.
11 ‘Je voulais faire un film sur le moment où c’est dans le ventre et que ça
monte à la tête, et non quand c’est dans la tête et que ça va vers le monde.’
12 Bradbury-Rance notes how the film includes ‘the spectacle of performance
(its opening is accompanied by the extravagant “Dies Irae” from Giuseppe
Verdi’s Requiem [1874])’ (2019: 78).
13 In his paper ‘Eyes wide open: The trope of lesbianism in Water Lilies’ given at
the Sussex Contemporary Directors Symposium on Sciamma (9 December
2020), Scott Reeser connected the image of the octopus [pieuvre] to the
reference to the same creature in Proust’s Un Amour de Swann (Swann
in Love) where Proust compares Swann’s jealousy to an octopus: ‘His
jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second, and finally
a third tentacle, fastened itself firmly to that particular moment, five o’clock
in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again’ (1996: 341) (‘Sa
jalousie, comme une pieuvre qui jette une première, puis une seconde, puis
une troisième amarre, s’attacha solidement à ce moment de cinq heures du
soir, puis à un autre, puis à un autre encore’) (1989: 279). This places Water
Lilies in a longer line of literary narratives of unhappy love.
14 Catherine Malabou, referring to Beauvoir’s work on myth, draws attention to
how ‘[t]he nymph is that malleable matter that men fashion over and over’
(‘[l]a nymphe est cette matière malléable que l’homme façonne à l’envi’)
(2020: 33). Sciamma keeps the image of the nymph, and her plasticity, but
explores it in a more autonomous space of female viewing, touch and pleasure.
15 This interest in the gritty, the crystalline, is an unlikely connection to
Rihanna whose music is so resonant in Girlhood. At the start of the
‘Diamonds’ music video, Rihanna pushes her hands through piles of
diamonds thick as gravel. The rocks run between her fingers. In 2014, at
the Council of Fashion Designers of America awards ceremony, Rihanna
wore a dress encrusted with 230,000 Swarovski crystals.
16 See Belot (2012: 173) for a different reading of the display of beauty in the
film in relation to Baudrillard’s work on seduction and artifice.
17 In the history of art, images of the goddess Diana with her nymphs, for
example painted by Titian in his Diana and Callisto (1556–9), offer
precursor images of all female worlds.
18 This is brought out particular strongly in her co-written script with Téchiné,
Quand on a 17 ans [Being 17], where the boys who become lovers literally
hit and bruise each other.
19 Bradbury-Rance speaks differently of ‘the muted disappointment of
unrequited desire (Floriane’s reciprocation only occurs in moments of
strategic necessity)’ (2019: 78).
20 ‘On retrouve aussi un thème très fort du cinéma de Sciamma (et de ses
scénarios pour d’autres cinéastes): celui de l’humiliation qui ne peut être
réparée qu’en humiliant en retour.’
21 See also Belot’s discussion of the trope of red lips in Water Lilies (2012: 178–9).
22 Bradbury-Rance writes that ‘[t]he girls go through the motions of breaking
the hymen, itself an antiquated and irrelevant token of virginity’ (2019: 91).
23 Beautiful though these images are, Floriane seems destined to stay in her
world in Cergy, voting for Sarkozy.
24 For Bradbury-Rance, ‘the star shapes that Marie and Anne make in the
water are like propulsions back to childhood’ as in this scene they are seen
‘in the shared haze of a blue filter’ (2019: 95).
25 The collection 5 Short Films Against Homophobia was produced with
French government funds for Canal+; the other films were directed by
Xavier Gens and Marius Vale, Sébastien Gabriel, Pascal-Alex Vincent, and
Rodolphe Marconi. Few critics have discussed Pauline, but it is mentioned
positively by Simone Emiliani, who describes the film as ‘a heartfelt private
diary, a confession to the camera’ (‘un diario privato a cuore aperto, una
confessione a macchina’) (2013: 53).
Tomboy
Childhood
Laure – how long-held this is the film does not reveal – and the
act of interpolation allows, or requires, Laure to speak and act with
Lisa henceforth as a boy, who is self-named Mickäel.6 Mickäel
exists in the wild spaces and games surrounding the housing
blocks he, Lisa, and the other children inhabit. The encounter with
Lisa offers a previously unfulfilled self-realisation, whether in a
trans identity, in boyhood, in gender fluidity, in lesbian desire, or
some combination of these. He keeps this secret from his family.
Sciamma offers a portrait of Mickäel, a boy played by girl
Zoé Héran. The careful visual construction of Mickäel bears
comparison with that of another cinematic boy character, Laurent,
in Louis Malle’s Le Souffle au coeur [Murmur of the Heart] (1971).
Sciamma comments to Ashby that she looked at French cinema
and coming-of-age films to find the energy of Tomboy (2012: 10).7
Her film follows richly in the line of Truffaut’s coming-of-age films
and Malle’s, and also of Akerman’s work as discussed in Chapter 1.8
Comparison between Murmur of the Heart, particularly, and
Tomboy allows a sense, illusory maybe, that Sciamma’s film offers
a queer or trans repetition, rehearsal, of certain scenes and poses of
Malle’s film. The closeness between the images of Laurent (Benoît
Ferreux) and Mickäel brings with it the assertion that a girl, or trans
boy, can also play the part of the protagonist, the embodied subject,
in French coming-of-age cinema.9 Akerman moved in this direction,
finding her passion for cinema through Godard, and filming female
protagonists. Sciamma pursues this move further in Tomboy.
Murmur of the Heart is an interesting point of reference because
it is also a film about adolescent sexuality, using the subject of incest
between a mother and son to open a critique of the bourgeois
family.10 Its mood and politics are very different from Tomboy,
but what it does provide is a schema for thinking about cinematic
portraits, showing both the face and the body. Laurent, unwell
with the murmur of the film’s title, goes to stay in a sanatorium for
a cure. The spaces of the sanatorium offer an arena where his body
is visible.11 He is shown with his own reflection in the bathroom
mirror, then glimpsed briefly naked as he enters a cubicle for water
treatment. His face and torso are seen sprayed with water, in serial
Figure 3.1 Still from Murmur of the Heart (Louis Malle, 1971)
Mathieu Demy
Jeanne
a cardboard box and runs screaming with joy away from her. Back
in the pink bedroom she squeals and collapses on the bed. They
romp and fight and nestle and the camera is there with them, in
the thick of their play. It is her intimacy with Jeanne that Laure
leaves behind as she goes out in the world as Mickäel.
In another scene, Laure is reading to Jeanne from The Jungle
Books. The film cuts to an image of Laure on the balcony of their
flat looking out at boys playing.21 Jeanne lies alone outstretched
in her tutu. She is left behind at this point as Laure goes outside.
In subsequent shots she is glimpsed drooping, her body posture
belying her depression. Mickäel’s love for Lisa displaces his bond
with Jeanne. This is illustrated in a direct cut from images of
long-haired Lisa in profile running in the woods, to a closer shot
of long-haired Jeanne, also in profile, in the bath with Laure.
In the bath Jeanne is doing a rap song about a girl who falls
in love. Laure takes the shower attachment as an improvised
mike to interview Jeanne. Jeanne plays Jacqueline, an adult star.
The colour-scheme is controlled, the girls’ skin reflected in the
peachy terracotta of the wall tiles. Light reflects off the water on
their bodies, and in the porcelain of the bath. Playing with plastic
figures leads to a game with dinosaurs and Smurfs. Laure collects
up Jeanne’s long locks and shampoos them. Jeanne in turn raises
Laure’s short shampooed hair into spikes. Sciamma shows Laure
in a world of play, and then traces her emergence into the world.
From this point on, the film charts gradual shifts in the closeness
between Jeanne and Laure. Laure pulls away from Jeanne to
become Mickäel as he is drawn into outdoor games with Lisa and
other children around the flats. Grief ensues for Jeanne. Tomboy is
in the quick of experience. The film shows the closeness between
the sisters, but does not mourn it as it passes, showing instead
different possibilities that open out. These are shown in particular
as Mickäel must negotiate his departures from Jeanne.
In a portrait scene in the film, generating the image that is used
for publicity material, Laure is drawn by Jeanne. The doorbell
rings and it is Lisa. She wants Mickäel to go out and play. Laure
takes Jeanne on her lap and explains to her that she is going out.
She moves between Lisa sitting waiting on the steps outside and
Jeanne sitting waiting in the apartment. Laure draws a watch
onto Jeanne’s wrist with a fat felt-tip pen (and later Laure draws
a heart on Jeanne’s arm). As Laure cuddles Jeanne close to say
goodbye, the scale of the shots shows the grief of the scene. There
is then a long shot of Jeanne sitting at the drawing table by herself.
Mickäel’s discovery of boyhood, of Lisa, of a broader world of
football, swimming, and dancing leads him away from Jeanne.
Jeanne in turn finds different ways of opening out her love
story with Laure. She is watching television by herself with
her toy creature when Lisa comes looking for Mickäel. Jeanne
immediately realises who Mickäel is. She sits on the hall floor
flexing her feet. She later confronts Laure with her knowledge. The
siblings do a deal whereby Jeanne too will go out to play. Jeanne
now finds a different complicity and intimacy with Mickäel. With
infinite flexibility, Jeanne comes up with a story about having a big
brother to protect her, adapting suavely to Mickäel. His arrival, if
anything, brings them closer.
Going out to play also allows Jeanne to make friends with
another little girl Cheyenne (Cheyenne Lainé). While loving
Mickäel, she now knows a different relationality. But her knowledge
of Mickäel’s gender is claimed proudly. She tells Cheyenne, about
her big brother, ‘he only loved me’. It is a fight after Jeanne has
been pushed over that leads to revelation about Mickäel. And it is
Jeanne who will comfort Laure on a night of insomnia and grief.
Jeanne gets into Laure’s bed, taking the initiative to come close to
her. She starts a game of Famous People. Laure’s first question is
‘Is it a woman?’ Jeanne replies ‘No.’ The scene is made up of a long
take as Jeanne and Laure play out their game in the semi-darkness,
and then Jeanne moves to put her arm round Laure and hold her.
The film cuts to a daylight shot of the girls asleep in the single bed.22
The intimacy of the relation between Jeanne and Laure, and
Jeanne and Mickäel, palpable through the art of the child actors,
traced in the sensitivity and imagination of Sciamma’s filmmaking,
allows a sense of the intensity of love in childhood, its inextrica-
bility from later attachments. This is a feminist film which, while
Lisa
between the audience and character created, but her words seem
to stretch beyond this implying that there is a particular sense of
peace and possibility to be found in suspending full disclosure.
Sciamma’s words are open, but it seems the readiest inter-
pretation is that ‘who Laure is’ in this account is queer. She does
not have to hide herself behind Mickäel to love Lisa. The film,
in this reading, affirms that possibility of alliance, relation, even
romance, between the girls.28 If Mickäel is a foil, a mask to allow
Laure’s closeness to Lisa, in the face of homophobia, then there
is liberation at the end. The possibility of female–female alliance
is a feminist goal here. But that it comes about as a result of the
mother’s shaming cis agenda and control of her child seems
difficult.29 Some wildness was let out in the film, some aspiration
to living and being a true self was unleashed.30
Tomboy is a film with competing narratives. It is told quickly, in
the quick of experience. It feels real at every turn and adds palpably
to the range of French cinema’s representations of childhoods.31 It
offers different attachments, different stories – a trans childhood,
attraction to a girl, and, above all perhaps, love between siblings.
It lets these stories co-exist. It creates a child who exists as a
girl, Laure, and as a boy, Mickäel. Sciamma shows how children
negotiate binary gender, both controlled by its dictates, and
imaginative, aspirational, about change and transition.
Notes
1 See Duschinsky (2014) for a brilliant account which considers Tomboy and
social constructions of identity, and childhood innocence.
2 See Jonet (2017: 1131) for a reading of Water Lilies through Stockton.
3 ‘filmer quelque chose qui est en train de disparaître’.
4 See English (2019) for readings of this as a film about transgender
childhood. Darren Waldron reads the film as a film of gender nonconfor-
mity rather than as a trans or lesbian film, writing that ‘the film reveals the
conditionality of all gendering by highlighting the performative strategies
undertaken by boys to comply with compulsory masculinity’ (2013: 60).
5 See Morel (2012: 69–70) for a thoughtful discussion of Tomboy in relation
to Althusser and interpolation.
20 Levanna also plays in Maïwenn’s Polisse (2011) but in a more minor role.
Polisse explores the work of the Brigade de protection de mineurs (the
French child protection squad) with Maïwenn herself playing a female
detective. For an excellent critical discussion of Maïwenn, see McFadden
(2014).
21 Morel points out that The Jungle Book is a story of a child living with
different species (2012: 70).
22 This is echoed later in Portrait of a Lady on Fire as discussed in Chapter 5.
23 ‘le regard des autres vous définit’.
24 ‘la fin du film c’est la fin du mensonge’.
25 ‘le fait d’affirmer qui on est c’est aussi affirmer la possibilité de ne pas avoir
à se cacher pour être qui on est’.
26 ‘un acte d’affranchissement’, ‘ce n’est pas un acte de retour à la norme’.
27 ‘Pour moi le mensonge est un sas de liberté, un espace d’expérimentation,
de recherche et de développement de soi, une bulle de temps où “tout est
possible”.’
28 For Morel, ‘[the film] suggests [. . .] that a friendship or homosexual love
would have been born between Laure and Lisa’ (‘[le film] suggère [. . .]
qu’une amitié ou un amour homosexual serait né entre Laure et Lisa’)
(2012: 71).
29 Jeri English is tentatively positive about the end, comparing the film to Ma
Vie en rose (Alain Berliner, 1997) and writing: ‘Seemingly, both Ma Vie en
rose and Tomboy end on somewhat optimistic notes: [. . .] Laure reunites
with Lisa under their given name’ (2019: 44).
30 Wheatley speaks of ‘a glorious summer spent playing football, wrestling
with pals and sharing chaste kisses with neighbour Lisa’ (2011: 79–80).
31 Gibson is less affirmative than I am, writing: ‘Sciamma fetishizes and
glorifies the child as forward-thinking and transgressive – the true “trans”
of the film – without truly making the child rebellious, while reducing the
adult to backwardness and the reactionary’ (2016: 220).
Girlhood
Mariannes noires
across race, and even across different areas of the banlieue, is not
straightforward. Sciamma makes a film with Black actresses, and
their work is critical to what is achieved as I shall go on to discuss,
but beyond their work it is hard to find evidence of participation
of other Black artists or technicians in the making of the film. The
film remains a vision of Black experience, from another part of
the banlieue. And, like me, the majority of its viewers and critics
are white.
Novelist Léonora Miano in Habiter la frontière [Living on the
border] speaks of the need for representations of Marianne, the per-
sonification of the French Republic, to include images of people of
colour (2012: 98). She looks at the intersection of gender and race
in issues of the representation of the female body, writing:
In line with the words from Miano cited above, Niang’s perspective
shows the film as insufficiently sensitive to the specific hurt and
damage felt transhistorically and in the contemporary moment by
young women of colour.14 For Miano this hurt, this memory of
the body objectified (and in history enslaved), corroborated by
the range of harmful stereotyped images of young Black women
that continue to proliferate in contemporary visual media, means
that the stakes are unusually high. Her call is for positive images
of young Afropeans, as Niang’s is for dissemination of works, and
examination of images, imagined and produced by Black women
themselves.15
I agree with Niang that Girlhood structurally and politically
lets down the youth Sciamma wishes to give a face to. Sciamma’s
very wish to grant that visibility is difficult. Response to the film,
which is also aesthetically beautiful, and strong in its feminism, is
enriched by this admission, or at least an airing of this. I am left
with ambivalence about its success. But in what follows I focus on
what is positive in the achievement of the film, and on what it may
reach towards in its moments of beauty and tenderness. Sciamma
did respond to the lack of Black protagonists on film in France.
Girlhood is at least in some small way part of a journey towards
equality and visibility of young Black women in French cinema.
Looking back at Girlhood, I ask whether this film also holds
positive representations of Black French women and girls. Through
its style and success, Girlhood has made other once-marginalised
kinds of films more visible in the contemporary film industry.16
Lycée
Sharpe looks for strategies for making Mikia’s point of view visible,
offering Black annotations and Black redactions, explanations of
history, context, injustice, so that ‘we might hear what she has
to say in her own defense in the midst of the ways she is made
to appear only to be made to disappear’ (2016: 122–3). Sharpe
makes racist bias and injustice apparent and invites readers, the
wider world, to hear the voice of a living, breathing girl. Sharpe
writes: ‘Aspiration. Aspiration is the word that I arrived at for
keeping and putting breath in the Black body’ (2016: 130). The
word holds breath and vision, the possibility of achieving justice
and the chance to flourish. This sense of aspiration, life first and
foremost, and fulfilment and pleasure, echoes with Miano’s call
for positive representations.
In Girlhood Sciamma, like Sharpe, draws attention to bias
in the school system showing this to be present in France, as
much as in the US. The trigger for telling the story of Marieme
in Girlhood is a moment of exclusion. The film takes stock of
Marieme’s conflicted family situation, where she looks after her
younger sisters, and is terrorised by her brother, but shows that
the catalyst for change in her life, her coming of age, comes in the
failure of the school system. The film cuts from the family home
to the public classroom.21 Marieme is interviewed by a teacher.
The girl’s face occupies the frame for the whole take. The film
offers a series of portraits of Marieme, with no cut-aways to the
teacher. This is a serial, living, breathing portrait. It is from the
point of view of the white teacher (and cinematographer and
filmmaker).22 But the film’s affective focus, its feeling, is with
Marieme. It encourages feelings of outrage and entrapment even
as it also observes its girl subject. Touré’s brilliance as an actress,
and the accord and inspiration found in her work with Sciamma,
mean that the scene conveys Marieme’s emotion, a sense of grief
withheld, of dignity and also of disbelief. The film is on her side,
and takes her seriously.
But notably the film does not critique the (white) images of nation
(Marianne) and class mobility (Rastignac) it references here.31
Diamonds
Girlfriends
Notes
telling the stories of her characters’ (2015: n.p.). In his review, A. O. Scott
wrote: ‘“Girlhood” can be described (like so many movies these days) as a
coming-of-age story, and it honors the genre, and its main character, with
exemplary sensitivity and sympathy’ (2015: n.p.).
18 Sciamma has filmed women from Les Molosses, Asnières-sur-Seine, one of
the premier ‘American football’ teams in France.
19 On the DVD commentary, Sciamma says that there may be hesitation
in this opening over whether these are boys or girls, and whether this is
France or America.
20 See Pember (2020) for a brilliant, different reading of musical moments
in Girlhood which closely examines ‘Dark Allies’ (and ‘Diamonds’) finding
through the politics of the pop music Sciamma cites, melancholy as well as
neoliberal resilience, and ambivalent affect.
21 This brief scene in the film merits comparison with other more extended
investigations of multiculturalism and the French education system, such
as Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs [The Class] (2008) and Julie Bertuccelli’s
La Cour de Babel [School of Babel] (2013).
22 She is played by Aurélie Vérillon, who played a part in Jacques Doillon’s
film about a small girl mourning her mother, Ponette (1996).
23 Divines has a memorable classroom scene where girls are given training to
become receptionists. As in Girlhood, this is a turning point in the narrative
and marks Dounia’s exit from the school system.
24 Speak Up also offers strong perspectives on racism in the school system
where academically high-achieving young women also speak of the ways in
which they are denied opportunities to progress at school or to access the
elite routes into higher education, in particular to the prestigious grandes
écoles from whose cohorts are drawn future leaders in the private and
public sector in France.
25 Mariannes noires is affirmative in the way it envisages diverse routes to
fulfilment and well-being, in filmmaking, music, hairdressing, running a
food company, and so does not only emphasise academic routes.
26 Sylla also puts a question to Romney: ‘how come none of the girls succeeds
in life’? (Romney 2015: n.p.). Sylla herself has had a successful career as an
actress, in film and TV, since the making of Girlhood.
27 The location is the Lycée Régional Denis Diderot in Marseille.
28 Maboula Soumahoro is author of Le Triangle et l’hexagone: Réflexions sur
une identité noire (2020), and Alice Diop has made the films La Mort de
Danton (2011), La Permanence (2016) and Vers la tendresse [Towards
Tenderness] (2016).
29 The reference is to Delacroix’s 1831 painting with the same title.
30 The reference is an allusion to the protagonist of Balzac’s Le Père Goriot,
from a comment by Sciamma on the DVD commentary (2015).
she grew up in a family where they watched a lot of musicals, Fred Astaire,
Gene Kelly (Garbarz and Martinez 2014: 25).
52 For Serge Kaganski, it is an epiphany (2014: 66). Niang writes; ‘This
hotel scene on a blue background stands out as an extremely strong
moment, aided by the beauty of the image and the expertise of the editing’
(‘Cette scene d’hôtel sur fond bleu se détache comme un moment
extrêmement fort, servi par la beauté de l’image et la technicité du
montage’) (2019: 233).
53 This seems indicated in the music of the film from the start. See Pember
(2020: 305) for discussion of the song ‘Dark Allies’, which she describes
‘melacholically investing in queer love, expressing singer Shannon
Funchess’s love for the female “dark all[y]” of the song’s title’.
54 I want to see the end of the film functioning differently from, for example,
the end of Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-ever (2002) where Lilya runs away
and jumps from a motorway bridge to her death.
The artist
portraitist in film, with the act of painting she makes the subject of
this film, offering momentary portraits of each girl, and opening
with a scene of drawing. This studio is the heart of the film, its
cradle, this scene postdating the action that then unfolds. In
this studio, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) recalls her passion for
Héloïse, the young girl, or lady, on fire of the film’s title. This
hushed space of the studio, with the girls circled around her, is
where Marianne casts back her mind, the images flooding.
Sciamma’s Marianne is a fictional character, but she is inspired
by a flock of women artists in history. The figure to whom she
comes closest historically and biographically – the film is set in
1770 – is Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, portraitist and author of two
volumes of memoirs, referenced in the film’s credits.4 Vigée Le
Brun, like Marianne, was the daughter of an artist, Louis Vigée,
and a prodigious talent. She was official portraitist to Marie-
Antoinette, and through her favour became a member of the
French Academy (Fumaroli 2015: 31). She fled Paris after the
Revolution with her small daughter, and made her living abroad,
as a portraitist, in Italy and Russia, before returning to France.5
Vigée Le Brun’s memoirs give no expression of lesbian desire,
though speak of her sensitivity to the beauty of her female
sitters, which she compliments, as they sit for her, to achieve a
finer portrait. Vigée Le Brun found relief and independence
abroad away from her husband, the artist Jean-Baptiste Pierre Le
Brun, and was deeply attached to her daughter, Julie, nicknamed
Brunette, of whom several child portraits exist, including two
where she is embraced with her mother, and one where she is
half naked, bathing. In her later years Vigée Le Brun enjoyed the
attention of her nieces, one of whom was also her pupil.6
Vigée Le Brun’s memoirs testify to her extraordinary love of
art. As she travels through Italy, fleeing France, in every city she
arrives in on her way to Rome, she visits the picture galleries and
churches. Her appetite for looking, at this moment where she
has fled for her life, and witnessed the revolutionary killing of a
number of her friends and associates, is intense. On her return
to France twelve years later, her first desire is to go to the Louvre
Amour
Figure 5.1 Stills from Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019)
Maman
The lovers capture viewers’ hearts in Portrait of a Lady on Fire,
but there are also others in this tiny all-female community in the
manor by the sea.29 Héloïse’s Milanese mother, La Comtesse, is
played by actress and filmmaker Valeria Golino.30 Sciamma has a
certain disregard for mothers in her earlier films. In Water Lilies,
parents are missing altogether. Sciamma’s Pauline can only exist
freely away from her family. In Tomboy the mother, pregnant
with a new baby, polices binary gender, imposing a female name,
girl clothes, and submission to normative laws on her child. In
Girlhood, Marieme’s mother Asma (Binta Diop), who raises her
children alone, and works at night as a cleaner in offices at La
Défense, is barely present in the film.31 La Comtesse is marginally
more present. Like the mother in Tomboy, she demands that
her daughter submit to a heteronormative contract (here of
marriage), and like Asma in Girlhood, who encourages Marieme
to take on a cleaning job, by necessity or desire, envisaging her
daughter replicating her own destiny.
La Comtesse has attempted to marry her eldest daughter to a
Milanese nobleman. The unnamed child has jumped from the cliffs,
without a sound, to escape this fate. Her death hangs over the film,
her destiny now foisted upon Héloïse who is brought out of the
convent to mourn her sister and to fulfil the marriage contract. There
is a certain horror in the resumed pursuit of this marriage even as
the first child has died, an area that is little explored in the film, but
illustrative of its strict verdict on the intransigent mechanisms of
heterosexual patriarchy, and the complicity of a certain generation
of elite women with this. La Comtesse is in mourning for her
daughter, but also melancholy herself on this rugged Brittany
coast, away from distraction, company, and cultural life. An insight
into her condition comes in a rare intimate dialogue she has with
Marianne at a moment when she discovers that this young painter
in her household can speak Italian, her mother tongue.
Marianne, like Vigée Le Brun travelling through Italy, is a
rare and historically accurate figure of an independent woman
Sophie
When Marianne first arrives at the manor she is met by Sophie,
who lights her way up the stairs and shows her to her studio. With
her white muslin cap, her simple garments, and her extraordinary
stillness and composure, Sophie resembles not figures in Vigée
Le Brun or Corot, but the young scullery maids and governesses
in the domestic scenes of painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin.
Sophie is the youngest of the four women at the centre of Portrait
of a Lady on Fire. Bajrami’s performance is arresting and the
images of her magnetic as the film also offers a portrait of this
very young woman. It is Bajrami’s second major part after she
played the schoolgirl, Apolline, in L’Heure de la sortie [School’s
Out] (Sébastien Marnier, 2018). As Apolline, Bajrami has the
same stillness and grace she conjures in Portrait of a Lady on
Fire, but the role of Apolline does not let her show the delicacy,
equanimity, and depth of feeling Bajrami displays as Sophie. There
are moments which, not advancing the plot, just offer a contem-
plation of her, at once a portrait and a still life. She arranges a
vase of wildflowers and, with her embroidery hoop, catches their
likeness in silken threads.
Sciamma pays attention to the young woman whose domestic
labour allows the existence in the manor to be pursued. Marianne,
an intruder, gender queer and class mobile, is more familiar with
Sophie than her mistresses. If Sciamma’s feminism draws her to
reflect on the lack of freedom of women of different ages, she also,
through Sophie, reflects on class difference and feminist alliance.
Sophie is not just present in the house, she also becomes closely
involved in the story of Héloïse and Marianne, in ways that make
the female body central to the film’s feminism.35
Marianne feels blood coming from her womb and finds refuge
in the kitchen where Sophie prepares her a small sack of kernels
holding warmth to soothe her pain. As they talk at the kitchen
table, Sophie comments that she has not bled for three months.
This is unexpected. All men seem to have been absent from this
secluded world. Sophie’s pregnancy speaks of an outside. She
Sophie is laid out in her white chemise, her knees up, Héloïse cho-
reographing her pose, she herself playing the wise woman. The
pose is repeated in the neutral setting of Marianne’s studio, the
traumatic scene a subject in art.
The film seems to allude to that move in late eighteenth-cen-
tury and early nineteenth-century art to allow painting to become
testimonial, seen in the work, for example, of Théodore Géricault.
Sciamma imagines visual testimony to abortion far in advance of
the feminist filmmaking of Agnès Varda in L’Une chante, l’autre pas
[One Sings, the Other Doesn’t] (1977), or of Paula Rego’s series
The Abortion Pastels (1998), made in response to a referendum
to legalise abortion in Portugal.38 Despite this lineage, and the
reflection on feminist art’s role testifying to the body as site of
pain as well as pleasure, the scene is one of the most uncomfort-
able in the film. Sophie, who was resting in bodily pain and grief,
watched over by Marianne, is made to relive her trauma, lying out
again, assuming the same position. This comes at the behest of
her mistress, Héloïse. Fascination with capturing the image, with
art, seems momentarily to over-ride the solidarity with Sophie
which has allowed the unwanted pregnancy to be arrested, and
the young girl’s life to be continued.
This wrestling with art and feeling is central to the film and its ability
to leave issues unresolved. In one of the scenes where Héloïse is
with Marianne and Sophie, she reads to them exerted passages
from Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book X, the story of Orpheus and
Eurydice. Orpheus, accompanying himself on his lyre, addresses
the deities of the Underworld, saying he came into their deathly
realm because his wife has succumbed, cut off before her prime,
poisoned by a viper. The King and Queen of the Underworld
are moved by his entreaties and call to Eurydice who is among
the spectres newly arrived in the valleys of Avernus. Orpheus
may find her again, on condition that he does not look back at
The film is also equivocal about whether Héloïse had the chance
to make any choice other than the destiny as bride, at her mother’s
behest, that she submits to. This is a source of argument between
the lovers before they part, Héloïse entreating Marianne to find her
anything but ‘guilty’ [‘coupable’]. The film is mute on whether, in
eighteenth-century France, Héloïse without fortune or profession,
could indeed have lived independently. More noticeable perhaps is
Sciamma’s choice to take certain liberties in conjuring this period,
while refusing the ultimate anachronism, a happy ending for the
female lovers.42 The film, its romance, is sustained in grief, in line
with the pain and rapture of all Sciamma’s films.43
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a backwards glance, aligning
Marianne with Orpheus the poet. In its form it plays with time,
vision, and illusion.44 Sciamma, together with Mathon, creates a
film that in its lighting, its liminal spaces and wild seas, looks back
to the classical subjects of Claude Lorrain in the Roman campagna
and forwards to the sublime landscapes of Romanticism. Its
elemental imaging of darkness, fire, grasses, sand, and the waves of
the sea conjures the wildness of nature. The secluded realm is also
an Underworld from which Marianne tries to retrieve Héloïse. It
is a space of shades and spectres, not only of Héloïse’s sister who
has jumped to her death, but of Héloïse herself.
Marianne’s reveries about the past are severally interrupted by
a ghostly image of Héloïse in her bridal dress. It as if the temporal
organisation of the film follows Marianne’s psyche rather than the
sequence of events. The intrusion of this image reveals her haunted
by the loss of Héloïse. Her lover is already pictorial, a vision, a shade
lost like Eurydice. Reclaiming myths of artistic inspiration, Sciamma
imagines her artist as a female Orpheus singing in her art.45
The filmmaker says in the Cannes 2019 press release for the
film, about her work with Adèle Haenel:
This collaboration is at the heart of the film which puts an
end to the concept of the ‘muse’ to recount the creative
relationship between the viewer and the viewed in a new
way. In our studio, there is no muse: there are just two col-
laborators who inspire each other.
She speaks of the desire for a love story based on equality and takes
this further to imagine a relation between artist and subject that is
consensual and complicit.46 It is also the case that Sciamma and
Haenel were romantic partners, and that Portrait of a Lady on Fire
dates from the period after their separation. In 2014, at the César
awards, Adèle Haenel thanked Sciamma, ‘I would like to thank
Céline because, because I love her.’47 By the time of the interviews
after Portrait of a Lady on Fire premiered at Cannes, Sciamma
speaks of their continuing intellectual dialogue and inspiration.
Coming twelve years after Water Lilies, Sciamma’s first film
starring Haenel, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a backwards glance at
Adèle Haenel, a last image of her as a young girl. Sciamma pursues
her relations with Haenel in the art they create between them, a film
itself about love and art.48 Even as she puts to an end the concept of
the ‘muse’, Sciamma creates a queer romance of love and filmmaking.
This also is part of her feminist legacy, and her almost unique position
in contemporary filmmaking as an out lesbian director.
The last images of Haenel are a prolonged portrait in film, a
study in emotions. Héloïse sits in a box at the opera listening to the
movement ‘Summer’ from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. She is convulsed
by the music, flooded with tears, like the Fates hearing Orpheus’
singing in the Underworld. This last sequence testifies to the grief of
Héloïse as she hears music, which has always been her passion, and
as she remembers her love affair with Marianne.49 This is a portrait of
Haenel as an actress. The film celebrates her beauty and her holding
of intense emotion, whilst also looking back on her through art. The
portrait is a tribute and also a new work of art, a new imagining of
feminist filmmaking. Sciamma describes the film to Iris Brey as ‘the
most joyful thing I’ve made in my life’ (Sciamma 2019).50
Notes
1 For Véronique Cauhapé writing in Le Monde the film is also a blank page, a
new departure for Sciamma (2019: 18).
2 It might be compared with the opening locker room scene with the small
community of girls in Water Lilies.
3 Iris Brey also connects these two film openings (2020: 87).
4 A retrospective of Vigée Le Brun was held in Paris in 2015. This era of new
veneration of women artists, and due attention, is the ground of the film.
5 It should be noted that Portrait of a Lady on Fire does not espouse Vigée
Le Brun’s anti-revolutionary and pro-royalist politics. Instead it makes
equality, one of the core values of the Revolution, its guiding concept.
In contrast to Vigée Le Brun, her contemporary Adélaïde Labille-Guiard
stayed in Paris and served the Revolution (Collective 2015: 83).
6 Xavier Salmon speaks of both Vigée Le Brun and her contemporary,
Labille-Guiard, training many female pupils in painting and drawing in the
years immediately preceding the Revolution (Collective 2015: 83). One of
Vigée Le Brun’s pupils, Marie Guillemine Laville-Leroulx, went on to paint
Portrait de Madeleine [Portrait of Madeleine] (1800). See discussion of this
painting as an important portrait at the moment of the first abolition of
slavery in France (Lafont 2019: 58).
7 It is moving to me that her portraits with her daughter now hang there.
8 See Salmon’s brief discussion (Collective 2015: 147). Sciamma names the
youngest character in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sophie, taking the name
of the female child whose education Rousseau discusses in Émile, ou De
L’Éducation [Emile, or On Education].
9 Marc Fumaroli sees her as a ‘secular heir of the tenderness and anxious
happiness of the Italian madonnas’ (‘héritière profane de la tendresse et du
bonheur inquiet des Madones italiennes’) (2015: 49).
10 By contrast Agnès Varda, who has responded so powerfully to images in
the Western tradition of painting, draws almost entirely on the works of
male artists, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso, and others.
11 Mathon speaks of creating ‘our eighteenth century – or as Céline said our
2018th century’ (‘notre XVIIIe siècle – notre 2018e siècle disait Céline’)
(2019: n.p.). Mathon was also cinematographer on Alain Guiraudie’s
atmospheric queer film L’Inconnu du lac [Stranger by the Lake] (2013)
and, in the same year as Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Mati Diop’s Atlantique
[Atlantics] (2019).
12 In her 1994 film about a woman artist and female friendship, Mina
Tannenbaum, Martine Dugowson shows Mina as a child copying Gains-
borough’s portrait of his two daughters, The Painter’s Daughters with a Cat
(c. 1760), and making the girls turn in to one another tenderly, in another
reimagining of eighteenth-century young women. Eighteenth-century
painting also inspires Joanna Hogg in the reference to Fragonard’s The
Souvenir (1778) from the Wallace Collection in her film The Souvenir
(2019).
13 Thomas Sotinel writes in Le Monde that this is ‘a world out of Breton
legends as much as eighteenth-century painting, made of chiaroscuro and
dazzling effects, dimly lit interiors and dreamlike visions’ (‘un monde sorti
aussi bien des légendes bretonnes que de la peinture du XVIIIe siècle, fait
de clairs-obscurs et d’éblouissements, d’intérieurs à peine éclairés et de
visions oniriques’) (2019: 25).
14 ‘Même si ce n’était pas notre époque, les portraits de Corot nous ont
inspirées. On y sent peu la direction et la couleur de la lumière mais plutôt
comment elle fait ressortir les carnations, les étoffes, les fonds.’ Salmon also
speaks in fact of Vigée Le Brun’s rendering of ‘skin tones, fabrics and other
substances’ (‘les carnations, les étoffes et les autres matières’) (Collective
2015: 97).
15 ‘Le rendu des carnations a été primordial dans mon travail. J’ai recherché à
la fois de la douceur, pas d’ombres marquées, un rendu un peu satiné et non
réaliste qui reste naturel et extrêmement vivant.’
16 In a new painting for the cover of the Criterion Collection edition of
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, pale pink paint slashes across the face of Adèle
Haenel playing Héloïse in her signature emerald green dress. The paint is
the exact colour of the lettering on the title of the film.
17 Sciamma says in interview with Iris Brey, ‘equality is the big project of the
film’ (‘c’est le grand projet du film l’égalité’) and she speaks of ‘the continual
surprise’ (‘la surprise permanente’) of equality (Sciamma 2019). Alice
Blackhurst writes: ‘Sciamma has suggested that one of the “key manifestos”
of her film is to thoroughly dismantle the enduring trope of the passive
muse, dismissed by the director as a “pretty word” which “conceals women’s
participation in art history”’ (2019: n.p.).
18 For Sotinel, the portrait shows Héloïse ‘destined for motherhood’
(‘destinée à la maternité’) (2019: 25), which is certainly borne out as a
later portrait of her which is seen at the Paris Salon shows her now with a
golden-haired child.
19 Blackhurst’s review (2019) is an important feminist appraisal of the film in
these terms.
20 Haenel starred as Yvonne Santi in Salvadori’s comedy crime drama En
Liberté [The Trouble with You] (2018) and as Denise in Quentin Dupieux’s
comedy horror film Le Daim [Deerskin] (2019).
21 Anthony Lane also remarks on a certain shift in Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
Where he says of the film that now and then it ‘acquires the dryness of
a tract’, he comments as well on its tactility, continuing: ‘[i]t couldn’t be
fresher if it were mixed on a palette in front of us, and the intensity with
which, in the second half, the women look themselves into love, as it were,
is fleshly, funny, and sublimely untheoretical’ (2019: 79). Jean-Baptiste
Morain questions: ‘Why is it then that the film is a bit disappointing? It is a
bit lacking in flesh, eroticism, letting go’ (‘D’où vient alors que le film nous
déçoive un peu? Il lui manque un peu de chair, d’érotisme, de lâcher-prise’)
(2019: 40). Jean-Philippe Tessé in Cahiers du cinéma writes Portrait of a
Alexander, Ella (2014), ‘Nan Goldin finds her Eden’, Vogue UK, 31 March,
<http://www.vogue.co.uk/article/nan-goldin-interview-eden-after-
photography-book> (last accessed 11 March 2021).
Ashby, Sam (2012), ‘Céline Sciamma’, interview with Céline Sciamma, Little
Joe 3: 7–11.
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spectacle’, Paragraph 31.2 ( July): 236–51.
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Seduction and be-coming’, Studies in French Cinema 12.2: 169–84.
Blackhurst, Alice (2019), ‘The defiant muse’, 22 December, LA Review of Books,
<https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-defiant-muse/> (last accessed 11
March 2021).
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Contemporary Cinema, New York and London: Berghahn Books.
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l’Olivier.
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(in some films by Catherine Breillat)’, Women: A Cultural Review 17.2:
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University Press.
Sciamma as director
Naissance des pieuvres [Water Lilies] (2007)
Screenplay: Céline Sciamma
Producers: Bénédicte Couvreur and Jérôme Dopffer
Music: Jean-Baptiste de Laubier (as Para One)
Cinematography: Crystel Fournier
Editor: Julien Lacheray
Marie: Pauline Acquart
Anne: Louise Blachère
Floriane: Adèle Haenel
Pauline (2010)
Screenplay: Daphné Charbonneau
Cinematography: Julien Poupard
Editor: Julien Lacheray
Pauline: Anaïs Demoustier
Girlfriend: Adèle Haenel
Tomboy (2011)
Screenplay: Céline Sciamma
Producers: Rémi Burah, Bénédicte Couvreur, and Tiphaine Perin
Music: Jean-Baptiste de Laubier (as Para One) and Jérôme Echenoz
Cinematography: Crystel Fournier
Editor: Julien Lacheray
Laure/Mickäel: Zoé Héran
Jeanne: Malonn Lévana
Lisa: Jeanne Disson
La mère: Sophie Cattani
Le père: Mathieu Demy
Other films
Les Rendez-vous d’Anna [The Meetings of Anna] (Chantal Akerman, 1978)
Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles [Portrait of a Young Girl
in the Late 60s in Brussels] (Chantal Akerman, 1994)
Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004)
Les Olympiades ( Jacques Audiard, 2021)
Ma Vie de Courgette [My Life as a Courgette] (Claude Barras, 2016)
Divines (Houda Benyamina, 2016)
Viskningar och rop [Cries and Whispers] (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)
Ma Vie en rose (Alain Berliner, 1997)