Portrait de la jeune fille en feu
Forbidden love in the 1700’s, remains mostly the same until about the 1960’s. You will be disappointed if you go in expecting Blue Is the Warmest Color.
Of course the comparison with Adéle is natural, but this is clearly a superior story, if not a direct response. Not a Bildungsroman, it’s more a cross-generation forbidden love story. Of course, society is not ready and it’s more like a fling, burns bright but it is quickly extinguished superficially, but remains in a dormant state for life.
The painter is tasked to secretly paint a portrait of the subject, the daughter of a rich family, to be wed to some Milanese family. This is like painting a catalogue showcase: based on this painting the marriage will be given the go ahead, the nubiles will never meet before.
Our protagonist is the second painter with this task, and the subject is also the second sister with the “task” of taking their mother out of this lonely house, into bustling Milan.
The mother already lost one sister to suicide, all hush hush (this is said only by the maid), it’s not confirmed she was involved with the previous painter. The painter is warned this is a sub rosa engagement.
The first painting goes about like the other one: the painter secretly does her job, gets emotionally involved with the subject, and in the cusp of delivering it, the subject sees it and hates it for what is represents, an arranged marriage. The painter is forced to destroy it, and loses her job.
But this time, the emotional involvement cuts both ways. The subject agrees to a new painting, and she poses for it. This is luckily done without the mother breathing down her necks, she goes away for a few days, enough time for the three girls to turn the house into a sorority, and our main couple to make up for lost time and bottled emotions.
The second painting is done and the subject is sold to the Milanese gentleman, which means they never see each other again. She regrets this fleeting romance before a life of loneliness, but the painter has another outlook: it’s better to have loved and lost, than to never love at all. Instead of this being presented blandly, it uses quotes from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (ripped off in the Bible, Lot and his wife leaving Sodom), and Vivaldi’s Summer piece.
They go their separate ways, but never forget those days. The painter has a long career of doing paintings based on her muse, and the subject sells a painting of herself with children, clutching a book opened on page 28, the one where the painter included her only nude self portrait. The subject is also seen emotionally in shambles when hearing The Four Seasons.
There’s also the maid subplot, concerning her having an abortion in the middle of other babies in the same bed. A striking image.
The whole César controversy might have overshadowed this, particularly if you subscribe to conspiracy theories those protests were all a ruse, but this is a worthwhile film. Probably “superior” to J’Accuse, hard to say since they are very different. Certainly awarding Polanski over Céline Sciamma carries a political message, since both films are filled with present allegories.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.