Céline Sciamma’s Transformative Lesbian Gaze
5 years on, 'Portrait of a Lady On Fire' is still an explosive piece of cinema
This is the Sunday Edition of Paging Dr. Lesbian. If you like this type of thing, subscribe, and share it with your friends. Upgrade your subscription for more, including weekly dispatches from the lesbian internet, monthly playlists, and a free sticker. I’m a full-time freelance journalist – your support goes a long way!
I wrote this essay several years ago after seeing Portrait of a Lady on Fire in theaters three times. It no longer exists on the internet, so I’m bringing it back online (with a few edits).
The force of the gaze is ever-present in cinema. Whether it be the gaze of the camera, the gaze of the characters, or the gaze of the audience, the act of looking – and of being seen – defines the medium. Gender and the systems of power that define society more broadly determine the trajectory of this gaze. In Laura Mulvey’s famous essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” she argues that the dichotomy of gender constrains mainstream filmmaking. In her own words, film conventions structure “woman as image, man as bearer of the look.” As a result, the man is the subject of the action, while the woman is the object of his (and our) gaze.
In her fourth feature film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma invents a new way of looking. While much of queer cinema is defined by looking, whether it be the longing gazes in Carol, God’s Own Country, or Moonlight, Portrait takes the act of looking as its object of study, interrogating its power dynamics and relationship to gendered structures of domination. By highlighting the female gaze, the lesbian gaze, and the gaze of the artist and her muse, Sciamma disrupts cinematic looking while also (re)creating a new visual language of cinema. This gaze is transformational for the characters in the film and for cinema itself.
The lesbian gaze in Portrait of a Lady on Fire disrupts the power dynamic of the artist and the muse. Marianne (Noémie Merlant) begins the film looking at Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) as her muse, and then as her lover. Conversely, Héloïse begins the film feeling like an object to be looked at, and eventually becomes a full subject, both in her own eyes and in the eyes of Marianne. As actress Adèle Haenel put it, she hoped to portray in her performance a “kind of a traveling between being an object and actually becoming a subject in the look of someone else.”
The most transformational moment in the film occurs when Héloïse reveals to Marianne that she, too, has been observing her. By returning Marianne’s look, Héloïse illustrates the reflective nature of the lesbian gaze. This moment inaugurates a sense of equality and collaboration between the two women that has a transformative effect on each of them.
While their relationship lasts less than two weeks, the power of this reflective gaze and the experience of true equality with another person stay with these women for the rest of their lives. In the final scene of the film, when Héloïse cries while listening to Vivaldi, we know, even though she does not look at us nor at Marianne across the theater, that she is remembering this freedom once again. The gaze of the camera, which is also the gaze of Marianne, closes in on Héloïse’s face as she looks elsewhere. This elsewhere is at the orchestra playing the song, yes, but it is also a gaze into the past, a past that will forever modify Héloïse and Marianne’s future.
In an interview, Céline Sciamma noted that she hoped “to create a form where ‘I love you’ is something that always has a future.” In this sense, the reflection of the lesbian gaze, one that exists between Héloïse and Marianne, as well as between the camera and the audience, reverberates long after the credits roll, and long after these women’s final moments together on screen. Héloïse and Marianne’s love lives on – in music, in painting, in us.
By imagining a new way of desiring, looking, and being seen, Sciamma confronts us with the notion that the finite is also infinite, and that the reflective gaze can trigger metamorphosis. As Sarah Ahmed argues in her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, “Identification is the desire to take a place where one is not yet. As such, identification expands the space of the subject: it is a form of love that tells the subject what it could become in the intensity of its direction towards another (love as ‘towardness’).” Héloïse and Marianne’s looks are reflective, producing the women as active subjects in their story and propelling them forward – towards a love that cannot always be, but will always be felt.
The power of the gaze encourages emotive responses from the audience, both because of the rarity of images such as these and the unadorned nature of the film itself. Portrait constructs a world almost entirely absent of men, apart from their brief appearances at the beginning and end of the film. This absence allows the women to inhabit the space completely apart from the male gaze, interacting with one another with tenderness, affection, and care. (A secondary storyline in the film involves Héloïse and Marianne helping a young maid perform an abortion, another process that often takes place beyond the purview of men.) While the pressures of the patriarchy – namely, Héloïse’s impending marriage – haunt the frame, our heroines’ actions remain passionate, tender, and uninhibited.
Indeed, the looking in the film, as well as the emotions that accompany this action, are completely unobstructed. In a similarly gaze-heavy film such as Carol, we often see through rainy windows or camera lenses. This obfuscation represents the distance the main character Therese feels from the outside world, partially because of her love for Carol. In Portrait, there is no such interference. As such, apart from three moments of diegetic music, the film is completely scoreless.
Because of this unadornment, the audience gazes and feels with Héloïse and Marianne as they interact. The role of the audience within the film is that of a spectator, yes, but also that of an invisible participant, reflecting and consuming these women’s relationship in silent contemplation. (When watching the film in a theater, you can feel the moviegoers holding their breath, not wanting to disrupt the quiet of these special moments.)
Sciamma creates a new language of desire with her sex scenes. Far from the exploitative sex scenes of Blue is the Warmest Color or even the beautifully scored and tenderly edited sex scene in Carol, Sciamma frames sex here as intimate, new, and belonging to these two women and no one else. As Héloïse asks in the film: Do all lovers feel as though they're inventing something?
The language of desire that Sciamma depicts here is not vague tenderness, nor is it overly frenetic passion. Instead, we see Héloïse rubbing drugs into her unshaven underarm, and later, two fingers slowly penetrating an armpit. The scene is shot as a close-up, so we do not know what we are seeing at first. As the location of this penetration reveals itself, we are taught in this instance that desire, especially lesbian desire, is so much more expansive than we are ever shown on screen. Sciamma’s careful, respectful, exacting writing and direction allow such moments to take place.
In a later scene, Héloïse asks Marianne for a self-portrait to remember her by. Marianne acquiesces and places a small mirror between Héloïse’s legs so she can see her reflection. In this moment of self-reflexive and erotic looking, we are denied what we expect to see between Héloïse’s legs and instead presented with the reflective nature of the lesbian gaze. This clever inversion of expectations withholds the voyeuristic spectacle of looking at Héloïse’s posed, fully naked form while also illustrating the erotic power of looking when that look is reflected back at you.
At the end of her essay, Laura Mulvey suggests how we might destroy the patriarchal language of visual pleasure in favor of something new. She writes: “The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive of a new language of desire.” Portrait of a Lady on Fire speaks in such a language. What the film teaches us is that the act of filming need not be exploitative, but can instead be collaborative, equitable, and intimate. In Sciamma’s transformative lesbian gaze, we find not only a revitalizing impression of the past, but also an emboldened vision for the future.
