Portrait of A Girl On Fire
A Conversational Analysis of Queer Film, Representation, and Archival Art
I remember watching Portrait of a Lady on Fire for the first time. I remember it better than most things I can recall from that time, though I can’t evoke the specifics of the memory. There are no details; I don’t have a clue what time of year it was or what I was wearing. The night was so similar to every other night that year that I can’t tell it apart. I remember it was during the pandemic. I remember I was sitting in the living room on the couch, alone, some time after midnight. I was probably wrapped in one of many miscellaneous throw blankets my family had left on the couch to die. I probably snacked on whatever junk I could find in the cabinet before pressing play. I only know for sure that at some point in the night, I sat and watched as Marianne and Héloïse touched one another, and therefore, themselves, for the first time. I remember what it felt like to finally feel seen.
I was young, fifteen or sixteen. Not yet comfortable in my teenagehood, but old enough that I was no longer a child. At the time I existed in a strange limbo of pseudo-queerness. I knew, factually, that I was a lesbian, but it wasn’t yet my identity. A few years before when I was in seventh grade, I started having panic attacks a couple of times a week, with seemingly no trigger or cause. I’d be walking down the hallway from one class to the next, and suddenly, panic washed over me like a wave, thick and heavy. It’d settle in my chest, making itself a home in the contours of my ribs and on the smooth landing of my sternum. I’d stand, unable to move, trying to breathe, but instead getting caught in the singeing fear which heated me from the inside out. After a moment of this, the thought would follow, “What if I’m gay?”
Like I said, there was no trigger. There was no defining moment that prompted me to examine my identity or my desires. I wasn’t eased into it with a playground crush or a cheeky game of spin the bottle; I was struck by it. Forcefully and with no warning. I remember once sitting on the yellow cheese bus on the way to school at seven in the morning, paralyzed by fear, afraid of what would become of me. What would my parents think? What would my family do? What kind of life would I live?
In these moments, alternate versions of my future played out before my eyes. I watched a version of myself marry a man, have kids, and settle for a comfortable, miserable life. I watched a version of myself go to art school, dance in a conservatory, and live a life so far away from mine at that moment that I could be who I wanted with little fear. I watched a version of myself take the hard route of telling my parents, and it ending with them kicking me out the day I turned 18. To ease the fear, I picked whichever story made me feel the most secure that day, which spiraling path led me to a version of my life I could be content with, and I played it out in my head over and over again for the rest of the day. With what I can now recognize as a thought compulsion, I quieted my young mind with the idea of a future, some kind of misshapen happiness. On that particular morning on the school bus, I picked the version where I begrudgingly married a man—mostly because I was still in the phase of realizing you're a lesbian, where you try convincing yourself you’re bisexual. At least then I could comfortably settle, I could find the one man on earth I was attracted to, and build a respectable life. It felt like there was too much on the line to choose anything else.
This went on for months, that burning feeling and the narratives that followed. It followed me from school to dance class, poking at the back of my neck during ballet barre, telling me to straighten up. Until one, odd day, I woke up in the morning for school, and the thought struck me as soon as I opened my eyes—but not the fear. I sat up in my twin bed, staring at the wall in the hazy light of dusk, and I thought to myself, “I’m gay.” I let it rattle around in my head for a bit, I felt it, the weight of it, and then I got up and went on with my day.
It was less of an acceptance and more of a resignation. I was tired of battling with myself, tired of telling myself lies to quiet the noise. So I surrendered a small part of myself to the truth, I accepted it in whatever fractured way my child mind could. My age is not lost on me here; I was wrestling with the trajectory of my life from that point forward in biology class. I was making plans to hide the parts of me that I loved while washing the dishes. My acceptance of my sexuality wasn’t a revision of my identity; in fact, it was the opposite. A coping mechanism, a sort of fight or flight response to the danger I couldn’t flee from, the one inside of me, to which I chose to freeze. It was both too big to deal with in that moment and not something to be dealt with at all. It was a hindrance and a non-issue, a life-changing revelation and an annoyance.
So I stopped thinking about it. I stopped engaging with it, stopped wondering, stopped imagining, stopped telling myself stories to quiet the noise. I told myself I’ll deal with it later. Later, the abstract place and time in which I would be better equipped to deal with it. When I was an adult, when I had my own apartment and supported myself, when I moved out of my hometown, when all my older family started dying, that would be when I would deal with it. I relegated my desire to a nameless, intangible place and time, which might never exist, for my survival. And from then on, I tried to live as I had before.
“Portrait [of a Lady on Fire] is a film about representation, about representing and being represented,” says Xueyan Cheng in her essay on the film. Representation is something I’ve always felt at odds with. I stand somewhere between understanding and valuing its importance, and feeling like it’s a cop out for true, revolutionary change. It doesn’t help that most of the time, the people being represented aren’t people like me: young, black lesbians who are artists, writers, and people who want to change the world. But the way Portrait approaches representation made me think about the topic a little differently. Mostly because it differs from most other films of its kind.
A few years after my self-fragmentation, I found myself in search of representation. At this point, I’d accepted that quiet part of myself I tried to ignore, and with college on the horizon, tried to imagine what my life might look like as an openly queer person. The thing about later is that, as much as it is ephemeral, it is also non-negotiable. You don’t get to choose when “later” is, but you can usually sense it coming. Always in a moment of flux, a moment when everything you once knew to be true is no longer. A moment when the systems you relied on for support vanish—the moment you’re least prepared for it. For me it was during the pandemic, when school, dance, and all the things I clung to to keep my mind off my fears suddenly disappeared. By this point, I’d become slightly more comfortable in my queerness. I could think about it, I could acknowledge it—I could even look at it, in the corner of my mind, and say, “Look, that’s a part of me. But please, stay there, don’t move.”
The problem was that there was no story I could tell myself about what my life looked like as a lesbian. When I closed my eyes, I just barely envisioned it; I saw hookups and short-term, non-committed relationships. I couldn’t imagine a long, queer life stretching out in front of me, not one with joy and safety. There was no framework for it. In a peripherally related conversation with friends a few years ago, we talked about different things we didn’t know black people were “allowed” to do, simply because we’d never seen it, on television or in movies. I said I didn’t know black people were allowed to do cocaine, because every time I saw someone doing coke on TV or in a movie, they were white. I wholeheartedly thought that we were banned from cocaine, or that the racial divide in drug usage was so strong that no race dared to cross it. Another friend said that she didn’t know black people were allowed to be bisexual, for similar reasons. And so when they started to question their sexuality as a child, they’d say to themselves, “Well, I’m black, so I can’t be.
And so, as I do in times of confusion and loss, I turned to stories. I got into the habit of watching anywhere between six and eight movies a week. They served to cure my boredom and humor my insomnia. But they also allowed me to explore my sexuality without having to confront it head-on. Instead, I confronted other people’s sexualities, analyzed their relationships, and found small parts of myself in them. It’s during this time period that I first watched my favorite movie to this day, Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015), and another favorite, camp classic But I’m A Cheerleader (1999). I watched the obligatory exploitative garbage, Blue is the Warmest Color (2013), and Below Her Mouth (2016). I watched the black lesbian required viewing, The Watermelon Woman (1996), and Pariah (2011). I watched The Favourite (2018). I watched Vita and Virginia (2018). I watched Saving Face (2004). I watched Bound (1996). I watched Rachel Weisz spit in Rachel McAdams mouth in Disobedience (2017) and have been just a little off ever since. At some point in the midst of all these films, I watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019).
The lack of black queer representation in general, but especially black lesbian representation, is not lost on me. To be honest, I wish I cared less about it. I wish I didn’t want something that feels so trivial in the grand scheme of things. But as you read on, I think you’ll come to understand the importance of such representation, and even further understand why a part of me wants it for my community so badly. There are girls like me out there needing to see a film that gives them an uncomplicated framework, one in which they don’t have to shrink or limit themselves in any way to fit it. They need movies that show them, specifically them, with curly hair and dark skin, that they can follow the impulse inside of them that tells them to be different, that it’s the only way to live. By no means does that subtract from the value of Portrait, or any other lesbian film with no black leads. But it’s simply the truth that all the meaning I take from the film is limited by my non-whiteness, my inability to truly place myself in the shoes of that character.
Portrait of a Lady On Fire is set in 18th-century France, and follows a young painter, Marianne, as she sets out to paint a portrait of a soon-to-be bride, Héloïse. The challenge is that Héloïse refuses to sit for the portrait, and so Marianne must paint her in secret. The film follows the two through the intimate process of portraiture, womanhood, and romance. At first watch, I, like many other young lesbians, was infatuated with the yearning. The anticipation of the romance, excitement at its incitement, and the sorrow at its end. There’s something about the longing of a lesbian glance. One of the first times I saw it represented was in Portrait, when Marianne and Héloïse are at the bonfire, and they catch each other's eye from across the grass--right before Héloïse realizes her dress is on fire, a metaphoric representation of their ordained relationship. I, too, had stared across the room at someone, and looking at them, realized I wanted something I couldn’t name, yet felt that the unnamed thing was already damned. It was a moment of recognition, of looking at the screen and seeing a distorted version of myself reflected back to me. I’m not a white French girl, yet I could see my heart in Marianne, like a Picasso portrait of myself. I was there, but I was also on my couch, alone. I clung to the glances, the sharp eyes beneath scarves, and the crescendo of the eventual kiss.
Portrait of a Lady On Fire represented parts of my experience while showing me the possibility of new ones. That feeling of wanting, of desire, was new to me. It was sitting in that same dusty corner with my queerness, waiting to be addressed later. I never knew there was a way for that kind of love to exist on the margins. When I realized that, I wanted it.
Five years later, I find myself in a similarly strange, yet entirely different place from the teenager watching Portrait for the first time. I’ve just graduated with my bachelor's degree, and I’m officially back living at home. Similar to the pandemic, the habits and support systems I built over the last four years have largely vanished. I spend my days meandering as far as I can go, letting the wind take me. I ride my bike for hours, I take the train and get off when I feel like it. I follow my mom to and from the grocery store just for an excuse to leave the house. It feels oddly similar to the pandemic, but this time, I’m a lot happier (I say that with much pride, invoking all of the struggle and work that got me to this place), but equally as bored and directionless. This time I’ve let myself relax into it. I go wherever my heart desires, whenever it does. It’s an unusual feeling. Because of my aimless wanderings, I’ve fallen back into old habits. Watching movies and television until my eyes burn and I’m forced to sleep.
I watched Portrait again out of sheer curiosity. I was unsure if it still held up; I thought my excitement at the romance might’ve clouded my memory of the film. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was wrong, and not only was Marianne and Héloïse’s relationship as heartbreakingly passionate as I remembered, but the film itself was speaking to the importance of representation at large. There's a line that struck me when I rewatched it that speaks to much of what I’ve been trying to express about myself in this essay. It’s when Marianne first arrives, and she’s discussing her task of painting Héloïse with Héloïse’s mother, called the Mistress. She explains to her the purpose of the portrait, for Héloïse's wedding to a Milanese aristocrat, then begins to reminisce on her own marriage portrait painted by Marianne’s father. She looks up at it on the wall and says, “This portrait arrived here before me. When I first entered this room, I found myself facing my image hanging on the wall. She was waiting for me.”
She was waiting for me. The woman the Mistress was meant to be had arrived in her home before she ever did. The idealistic representation of her role as a wife and mother took up space in there before she could. I had a similar idea about my life as a young girl, that who I was meant to be was already waiting for me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve known the responsibilities that would be placed on me one day. I’d be a caretaker, whether that was of my own children, my parents, or my siblings. I’d do what I was told, by a man in some way, shape, or form. At least I had the privilege of being expected to go to college, and the even larger privilege of getting to study whatever I wanted and go wherever I wanted. Most things in my life up to this point haven’t felt like a choice; they’ve been waiting for me. What a burden that is? To enter a room knowing everyone there already has an idea about you, already has an expectation of you inside a socially constructed role. How is any woman supposed to truly know themselves if their life is predetermined from birth by men?
I’ve always felt, for lack of a better word, marginalized. My wants and needs do not align with those of a “traditional” woman. My interior life always felt much larger, much more difficult to contain than the women I grew up around. I never dreamt about a wedding, I never dreamt about kids, but I did dream about greatness. I dream of excelling, I dream of being recognized for my talent, and I dream of being able to make art in whatever capacity I see fit. In the film, Marianne approaches life similarly. Unlike most women in the 1700’s, her life doesn’t revolve around herself in service to others. She dedicates herself to her art, first and foremost. We are both of a similar privilege, one of choice. She chooses to work under her father, hone her craft, become a great painter, even if she has to do it in secret, instead of being a wife or a mother. This position initially puts her at odds with Héloïse, who so greatly desires to break free from her role as a woman. But instead of putting these women in opposition to each other, the film makes one of them a respite. Héloïse desires freedom and finds it, even if briefly, in Marianne.
In the film’s social structure, Marianne can function as either a woman or a man, sometimes occupying both roles at the same time. She’s a “man” in the broader cultural and social sense as she occupies a male role. She’s a trade worker who supports herself and hones her talent, but is specifically resigned to portraiture, a move that situates her squarely in her femininity despite her divergence from it. Marianne is not allowed to paint anything that doesn’t already exist. She’s not allowed to create, only represent. When she does create her own original work, she displays it under her father's name, so it can be shown at galleries. Additionally, her ability to exist as an artist is because of her father's legacy. He has connections that get her work; when he dies, she plans to take over her business. Much of her existence in this male social space is because of her relation to her father. Marainne finds this limiting; she complains about female artists not having the same training as men, not being pushed to be as great as them. But Héloïse, trapped in a marriage she never agreed to, seeing a life of misery on the horizon, sees the small freedoms in Marainne’s constraints and capitalizes upon them.
In the middle of the film, right before Marianne and Héloïse's romance takes flight, there’s a B-plot I’d completely forgotten about. Sophie, the estate’s maid, reveals to Marianne that she’s pregnant, and Marianne asks if she’s going to keep it, to which Sophie says, “No, I was going to deal with it when the countess left.” What follows is one of the most remarkable sequences I’ve seen in a film, so much so that I can’t believe it didn’t grab me on my first watch.
It begins with them exhausting the natural remedies. Héloïse and Marianne bring Sophie down to the beach and make her run laps in the sand. They then move to the fields, where they search for the right herbs to make an abortive tea for Sophie. When they arrive home, Marianne prepares the tea for her to drink, while Héloïse sits at the table reading. Up until this point, the very few times we see Sophie are in the kitchen. She cooks all of the meals, she cleans the kitchen, and then she leaves the frame, assumed to be doing some other house labor. She’s so invisible, you forget she’s even there until the Countess leaves. But from that point forward, she becomes a focal point in Marianne and Héloïse's lives. They care for her through her attempt at an abortion, the three play cards together at night, and they share meals at the table. As soon as the countess leaves, so does the hierarchy of the estate. Her sudden absence leaves a vacuum of power; no one is around to uphold the structures which shape these women's lives. Instead of jumping to recreate it, these three women instead relish in the freedom of being alone and form a community.
When Sophie's medicinal abortion doesn’t work, Héloïse and Marianne take her to a local healer woman to get the procedure done. The scene plays out quietly. Héloïse and Marianne accompany her to the woman's home and stay with Sophie through the procedure. They stand only a few feet away, in a room lit by a fireplace containing only a bed and a stove. On the bed, the woman lies Sophie on her back, spreads her legs, and inserts a hand, elbow deep inside of her to terminate the pregnancy. Sophie starts to moan and shout from the pain. Marianne moves her head away, but Heloise forces her to look. The two watch, with fearful glances, and Sophie endures the pain of the procedure, which will save her life.
In the next scene, they’ve returned home and put Sophie to bed, and the two women sit with her as she falls asleep. There’s a heavy silence as they wait for her to fall asleep, and in a sudden movie, Héloïse lifts Sophie out of her bed, and positions her on the ground as she was earlier. Héloïse stands in for the woman who performed the abortion, placing a hand underneath Sophie’s dress. She nods to Marianne, who then picks up her pad and begins to sketch the scene.
Before watching this film, I, like many others, didn’t know that abortions were performed in the 18th century. I thought that if you became pregnant, you had to live with it; there was no way out. Seeing it represented in the film, I learned that not only did these procedures exist, but they were utilized routinely and upheld through female community structures. Sophie meets the woman who can perform her procedure at a local bonfire, only attended by local women, where they speak freely with one another. In this group, they dance, sing, speak, and express themselves by the light of the fire. These structures of community were integral to their survival; they provided not just social interaction, but medical care. These things that we talk about so much in the abstract, community, mutual aid, radical love have existed for centuries. But how else would we know if the media we consume doesn’t represent that?
Portrait does something special with this. Seeing not only the abortion on screen, but the character's own recognition of its importance functions as a kind of double memory. Not only does the film represent this process to the viewer, saying, look at this, it happened, don’t forget, the characters themselves also recognize that this is something to be remembered. They aren’t ashamed of Sophie's actions; they’re proud. Proud of her strength, her tenacity, her bravery. The scene was a way for women who’ve suffered in silence, who suffered with no remembrance, to look at the screen and say, We were here, this is what we did. You can do it too.
In her essay Recentring Peripheral Queerness and Marginal Art in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Madeleine Pelling says about the film, “ Sciamma draws viewers’ attention to the construction of images, and the feminist and queer possibilities in deconstructing and reassembling them… cinema is positioned as the inheritor, and queerer, of painterly modes of representation.” Pelling puts words to what grabbed me upon rewatching this film: cinema as a way of queering the narrative modes of representation. Both the film itself and the portraits within it serve to distort the narrative about women in the 18th century, for the purpose of creating something more akin to reality. The narrative about women, as we understand it, was written by people who seek to objectify and appraise women. Think of how you were sold womanhood as a girl; you were told about your wedding, your children, and your husband. You played with baby dolls for fun while boys smashed trucks and punched each other. Womanhood as we know it is a story, nothing more. It is an idea that was constructed by people who recognize the value in a submissive person-thing that can be paraded around during the day and put to work at night. What makes a “real woman,” or a “good woman,” is not only subjective but completely immaterial.
The portrait not only acknowledges this immateriality, but distorts it, using something Aaron Betsky calls “The Queer Space.” “Queer space is something that is not built, but implied, and usually invisible. Queer space does not confidently establish a clear, ordered space for itself [ . . . ] It is altogether more ambivalent, open, leaky, self-critical or ironic, and ephemeral.” Queer space, unlike female space, is not tangible. While narratives about womanhood might be ephemeral, the spaces in which it takes place are not. The kitchen, the bedroom, the cul-de-sac, all spaces where women are meant to perform womanhood as it’s been taught to them. Queerness, on the other hand, does not have a space, as there is no space in which queerness is productive to the patriarchy. Queerness is not taught; in fact, it is erased. Within the capitalist patriarchy, queerness is destructive; it deconstructs the nuclear family, community, and heteronormativity as a whole. Narratives about queerness don’t even register it as real; they are a perversion of the norm, a distortion of what is “right.” This pushed them to the margins, to the intangible space.
While this can be a disadvantage for queerness on one hand, on the other, it can be something beautiful. Anywhere can become that intangible space. A physical place is not needed for queerness. It requires just one thing: the absence of power. When the Mistress leaves, the estate becomes a queer space. These three women build a relationship with each other that goes beyond patriarchy; their care for one another is greater than the powers that seek to stifle them.
The inevitability of loss is the current that underscores the entire movie. It’s what grabbed me and didn’t let me go the first time I watched it. From the moment Héloïse and Marianne lock eyes, their love is doomed. And that pain is present through each interaction, each kiss. It’s not that their love is forbidden; it’s that it will end. But what I missed the first time was that while it might not exist forever in the present moment, it will exist forever in the queer space, or better, the queer story. Once again, portraiture is utilized by the narrative as a feminist archival tool, rather than a patriarchal one. Unlike traditional portraiture, where a stranger, usually a man, comes in and paints you while knowing little about you, Marianne gets to know Héloïse before she paints her. They take lengthy walks, they share meals, they eventually fall in love and learn the contours of each other's bodies. This distorts the usually objective method of portraiture, in which the painter has all the control over the subject, into a more communal one. Héloïse is an individual, not just involved in the creation of the portrait, but inherent to it. The relationship she forms with Marianne influences how the portrait comes out. She sees her true smile, she gets close enough to see moles she couldn’t from afar, she’s able to capture something more akin to her soul in the picture because she knows her heart. This is not a portrait of a woman, one who only exists to serve her unknown husband and unborn child. This is a portrait of Héloïse. She is alive, and the process of her portrait will keep her alive and close in Marianne’s memory. The inevitability of their fate is softened by the sureness of remembrance.
I picked up on almost none of this the first time I watched this movie. I don't think my first impressions were necessarily bad or wrong; in fact, I think they were just right. At that moment, I needed to latch on to the hope, to the idea that love could exist on the margins, even if it was brief and sure to end. It showed me an alternative history, a story different from the one told to me by the mainstream, where women in the 1700’s were simply wives and mothers to be bought and sold. It showed me what women could be, specifically, who they could love. It showed me that the feeling I’d been wrestling with inside, pushing down and away into the darkness, was natural and has existed in women for centuries. It showed me that the struggle to be your truest self is not new, and it showed me that there is joy to be found even when pain at the end is inevitable. I learned something about myself, watching this film on my living room couch at 2 am while my family was asleep upstairs. In that queer space, my pitch dark living room with the glow of the TV showering over me, I was able to negotiate my identity for a moment, access the longing that I routinely ignored. I was able, even if just for two hours and eight minutes, to be free, to access a part of myself I kept hidden away during the day.
That’s the thing about the queer space, because it’s ephemeral, it is always near. It doesn’t need structure to exist, doesn’t need walls, a floor, windows, chairs, or tables. All it needs is an individual and a story. One that opens them up to a truer, more innate version of themselves. That’s what queer stories do for me, and so many other queer people. They create the space to express and understand their identity, because those spaces rarely exist in the material.
I don’t know what to leave you with. I feel I’ve already said enough, probably too much, and I’d rather not belabor the point. I’ll say that, as queer artists, the work we do has meaning. Because there are people out there who don’t know what to do with their desire and their longing. There are people who believe they don’t deserve to live because of who they love. Many of us know the feeling too well, many of us have done the work to escape it. And if you have the privilege to create, and to pursue arts as a career, it’s your duty to your community to do it. How else will we survive? Who else will tell our stories?
Works Cited
Cheng, Xueyan. REVISTA FAMECOS Mídia, Cultura E Tecnologia Artigo Está Licenciado Sob Forma de Uma Licença Creative Commons Atribuição 4.0 Internacional. 3 Nov. 2023, https://doi.org/10.15448/1980-3729.2023.1.44857.
Pelling, Madeleine. “Recentring Peripheral Queerness and Marginal Art in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019).” Humanities, 2021, https://doi.org/10.3390/h10020073.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Directed by Céline Sciamma, NEON, 2019.
