Director’s Notes: Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Late into our first day of filming, Ella (After Party’s director of photography) and I found ourselves in a classic situation: our dream setup for a shot was clashing with the very real time pressure of making our day. We were shooting in a room that was hot and cramped. The haze machine we’d rented was unreliable and making everyone a bit, well, hazy. Ella and I stared at the monitor, suggesting slight adjustments. Finally, Ella said “you know, it looks like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, we’re good to go.”
Portrait, released in the US weeks before the pandemic closed theaters, is not a film that requires much of an introduction. You probably already know that it’s a brilliant meditation on love as a series of looks – a delicate dance of desires and perspectives between gazes and gays, etc. I was woefully unfamiliar with writer/director Celine Sciamma when I saw Portrait back at the New York Film Festival in 2019 and called it “a crushing blow to the soul.”
And it is! But Sciamma is also exploring how such a meaningful piece of art – and how a meaningful connection between two people – can be constructed. Hence the titular portrait. This self-reflective quality marks a real leap forward for Sciamma’s filmmaking, one that would carry over to her 2022 follow-up Petite Maman (an extremely underrated movie that I highly recommend). And as a result, the film’s influence on After Party ran far deeper than an echoed shot of two women lying in bed together.
Of course Sciamma’s film served as a guide for the relationship between Ellie (Ashley Leake) and Olivia (Julianne Cozzette), with repressed queer desire eventually blossoming into romantic connection. Men are really pushed to the periphery of Portrait, though a patriarchal presence looms throughout; Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) and Marianne (Noémie Merlant) are painfully aware that their days together are numbered. The connection they share is an exception – After Party is a movie with a lot more men, but they’re there to (hopefully) illustrate how special the relationship between Ellie and Olivia is.
At the same time, Portrait was also a guide for me as I attempted to do justice to the real-life inspirations of this story. I have a lot of love for my friends Esther and Elise, and while that love is different from the love Marianne has for the woman she’s painting, Portrait is determined to complicate traditional ideas around artist and muse. Héloïse is deeply involved in the creation of her image; from the very beginning of the After Party process I wanted to make sure that Esther and Elise were included and in-the-loop. Sciamma’s film makes it very clear that the work only stands to benefit from this type of dialogue – I know After Party did as well.
- Jonah Koslofsky, Director
