Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Céline Sciamma on her ravishing romantic masterpiece

“Titanic is the hugest success, and it’s because it’s totally queer,” says the French filmmaker.

By Emily Todd VanDerWerff

Héloïse and Marianne comfort each other with the rolling sea behind them. Neon

Few movies have ever hit me as hard as Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the new film from French director Céline Sciamma. (Read my review here.)

Sciamma’s unique talent for capturing the lives of women who are rarely placed at the center of cinematic stories might not seem to be a particularly strong fit for a period piece about an aristocratic woman dreading her impending marriage.
But in the story of the budding romance between Héloïse (the aforementioned aristocrat) and Marianne (the woman who will paint her portrait), Sciamma found a way to talk about so much of the history that usually is left on the cutting room floor, of the women and queer people of the past who are too often pushed to the edges of the stories we tell about times long gone.

Note

1. ravishing = charming = delightful = entrancing
2. impending marriage = forthcoming = about to happen
3. budding romance = just beginning and showing promising signs of continuing
4. aforementioned = afore(before) + mentioned
5. "left on the cutting room floor" : be cut out when film editing
6. long gone: long time ago

The movie is quietly radical in its gender and class politics, but it’s also wholly approachable. At one point when we spoke, Sciamma said she thought a lot about the movie Titanic while making her own film, and it shows. This is a classic love story, but one that hides considerable political depths.

Note

1. sth. is radical in ... but it's also wholly approachable.
   radical ~~激进的; approachable = friendly/welcoming/open

There’s lots to talk about with Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is why I was so glad to speak with Sciamma when she visited Los Angeles (for the first time ever, she said) to attend the Golden Globes金球奖. (Portrait was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film there but lost to Parasite寄生虫.) Our conversation ranged all over the map, from lighting rigs to Greek myths. It’s been lightly edited for length and clarity.

To be continued...