four: turn around! (notes on looking)
Morning friends,
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, now streaming on Hulu, was the last movie I saw in theaters before California’s shelter-in-place order. We watched it the night after the Oscars, on a Monday. Pony and I live near Arclight Hollywood, so we always walk there, cutting across Whitley Heights, slinking up and down hills that snake into wide, hectic boulevards. Meandering by the usual sights: the former Knickerbocker Hotel, the very scuzzy Walk of Fame, the Scientology Information Center, Amoeba (RIP). When we arrived an unexpected treat: due to size of the crowd, the movie would be screened in the Dome, the golf ball-shaped theater originally built in the sixties to present Cinerama films. From our floor seats, the screen curved majestically in front of us, a portal into another world, like staring into the arc of an upside down crescent moon. We shared buttery popcorn and split a spicy dark chocolate edible, our ritual. The images loomed over us, and at one point, I wondered if we would be snatched up by the screen, never to be seen again.
Set on an isolated island off the coast of Brittany during the eighteenth century, Portrait revolves around the brief but transformative love affair between Marianne, a talented painter-for-hire, and Héloïse , a sheltered aristocrat unhappily betrothed to a Milanese nobleman she’s never met. After crossing the choppiest of seas in a claustrophobic wooden boat (at one point jumping into frigidwaters to save her canvas that fell overboard), Marianne arrives at an austere, drafty castle populated only by the Comtesse, Héloïse, and Sophie, their teenage maid. The Comtesse has commissioned Marianne to paint a portrait of her daughter, which will be sent to her husband-to-be for his appraisal, her image arriving before she will. Brought in after Héloïse refused to sit for the previous male painter, Marianne has been instructed to pose as her walking companion. She must silently memorize her features by day in order to secretly complete the portrait at night. A turn of the cheek. Hands resting on a lap at the beach. A tousled chignon.
Educated in a Benedictan convent, Héloïse is charmed by Marianne’s worldly flourishes: she smokes tobacco from a pipe, can fumble through Vivaldi’s Summer on the harpsichord, and narrowly escapes the pressure to marry since she will inherit her father’s painting school. Their conversations and looks sound their own discordant harmonies, releasing them, momentarily, from the social pressures of their time. When Héloïse eventually learns the truth and sees the finished product, she’s disappointed by Marianne’s bland approach. “Is this how you see me?” In a move that surprises the Comtesse, she agrees to sit for Marianne. Their love blossoms under this creative relationship, painter and model, but the film scrambles what we’ve come to expect from this type of romance, in the process reworking our notions of beholder and beheld. Often, the muse is relegated to mere footnote or tantalizing resource, a well of inspiration drained of consciousness, desire, history. But here, Héloïse is a dynamic force, challenging Marianne to see the look as a negotiation of presence and intimacy.
Sciamma popped by afterwards for a brief Q&A session. She talked about the gaze and tension and desire and discipline and resistance and lovers and poets. About the wily dance between the present moment and abstract ideas. One thing she said continues to follow me like a ghost. The gaze is all about rhythm. That it communicates the characters’ melodies. Music is used sparingly and strategically in Portrait. Under the cavernous Dome, sound is meant to be a spectacle, so Portrait’squietness was unnerving at first. You could hear breathing, chewing, clearing of throats. The ambient noise of the audience mixed with atmospheric sounds of the movie. Without an anchor to influence your reaction, the biting of a lower lip or the flutter of eyelids became crucial. In lieu of musical cues, Sciamma sculpts sound from the characters’ movements, paying special attention to the tempo and pacing of individuals in thrall, passion’s slow discovery. Marianne’s aching brushstrokes. Héloïse’s tart smirks. The shudder of fingers scaling a neck. Have you ever thought of your gaze as a song?
Portrait had been a few weeks into its US wide release when coronavirus shut down theaters indefinitely. The sudden closures forced movie studios to regroup. In Portrait’s case, its home release, which had been scheduled for later this year, was bumped up to the end of March. Now you can wander through Sciamma’s tone poem from the confines of wherever you dwell. Watching it from the couch, I can’t help but think of all that has changed since February 10th. Half of me is transported back to that night, back to before, to the realization that we’re still in the beginning phases of a pandemic. One small thing I miss, out of many: the dark intimacy blooming unsaid between strangers in a theater. It’s impossible to tap into that quiet from my apartment. Helicopters soar and babies whine and hammers bang. Distractions abound. In a theater, though, my body stills. It’s like a meditation. The pleasure of looking. That momentary merging. Our shared breathing. A world without theaters seems impossible, but it’s hard to imagine them bouncing back from coronavirus unfazed (Universal Studios bluntly announced that theatrical releases would no longer be a priority, even when theaters do reopen, following the lucrative VOD release of Trolls World 2).
How to recreate that hum of looking together? The spontaneity and wonder.The gaze is all about rhythm. The phrase plays in my head like a chant, the beat rippling out from my heart center. Beckoned, I watch Portrait again and in pieces, trying to locate the music in the looks. I want their music to touch my insides.For two hours I am able to forget the noises in my head, the chaos encircling the US like a raggedy mote (reopening, post office, rent due, 50k+, bleach). For two hours my only worry is which choice I’d pick: lover’s or poet’s.Marianne’s words stain the edges of each shot. We are watching a memory after all, time bending backwards, Marianne’s reminiscence after being prompted by a curious student, who interrupts her during portraiture class to ask about an uncovered painting in the corner: a woman wandering a moon-swept beach, the hem of her dress chewed by flames.
The first time Marianne sees Héloïse, she is turned towards the door, draped in a violet cape, her face obscured. The foyer resembles the mouth of a cave. She proceeds outside without saying a word. Soon she is running towards the edge of the cliff. The blue of the sea blurring into the blue of the sky. An incredulous Marianne trails behind. Héloïse stops inches before the ledge, finally spinning round to face her companion and us watching on the other side, a ferality throbbing in her eyes.Cinematographer Claire Mathon, who worked on Atlantiques’ moody palette, infuses the visuals with the soft, creamy texture of an oil painting. Rich variations of light filters through the muted colors and pictorial landscape, emanating but never dominating whatever it touches, allowing Mathon to capture fleeting emotional cues, “the slightest trembling” of faces and gestures. Her methods extend to the gaze: “We had to look at these faces and not frame them. To be with them.”
At first, Marianne wishes to hide behind the anonymity of her looking, the power to deeply see without revealing a drop of yourself. She’s thrown off by Héloïse’s mysterious defiance, her habit of returning eye contact, her refusal to be a pliant blank slate. The unfinished picture by the fired male painter shows a woman without a face, a swirl of frustration where eyes, mouth, nose should be. Thrillingly, he cannot access Héloïse’s gaze. Portrait, writes Mark Lukenbill, is in conversation with a long list of paintings and film hauntings: Laura, Portrait of Jennie, Vertigo, The Woman in the Window. In those films, the portraits function as a fetish object, a symbol of the male protagonist’s unattainable fantasy, ultimately leading to their ruin. Sciamma isn’t interested in affirming their controlling version of love. “We are trying to propose another politic of love where it’s not about possession or donation or eternal love or death or eternity or whatever. It’s more about love as a dynamic that can only grow,” she tellsIndiewire. In another interview she interrogates our habit of equating a happy ending to never ending possession. Her story charts the discovery of desire, the woozy steps leading to full-blown infatuation. It also makes space for the aftermath, the memory of that desire, riffing off the rush and sting of nostalgia, of recollecting what can no longer be.
In one of my favorite scenes, Héloïse recites the end of “Orpheus and Eurydice” to Marianne and Sophie, the three of them forming a tender bond after the Comtesse departs the island for a few days. They debate Orpheus’s decision to turn around, thus dooming his beloved, Eurydice, to the underworld. A fatal disobedience. Sophie decries his selfishness, his inability to patiently withhold his look until reaching the light of the caves. Marianne serenely explains Orpheus made the poet’s choice instead of the lover’s, choosing the memory of Eurydice, the promise of infinite reproductions, over her presence. Héloïse offers another provocative reading: Eurydice called out to Orpheus, compelling him to look, willing her return to Hades. She constructs the song, the painting, the poem, her ability to return via art. Whether through their movements or words, the two lovers invoke Orpheus and Eurydice repeatedly throughout the movie. Marianne sees visions of Héloïse in white, a bridal demon, sometimes following her, other times being pursued. And the camera seems to creep behind our heroines, anticipating the moment of turning and loss.
Another layer that makes Sciamma’s rumination on love and memory and desire and artistic collaboration fascinating: Héloïse is played by Adèle Haenel who appeared in Sciamma’s first film, Water Lilies. They two were in a romantic relationship for many years, but parted ways sometime before shooting Portrait. The movie can be read as a paean to Haenel and the creative landscape that cradled their expansive connection. In the same way that, for Marianne and Héloïse, the look encompasses not only physical attraction, but intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual magnetism. To read a face like a text. To enter a body like a song. To hear a secret language in averted glances and flared nostrils. They rid themselves of the frames of seeing, sketching a new definition of love, one unchained from uneven power dynamics.
They circle round each other, a crackling bonfire caught in the space between their gaze. They are not lovers yet, but will soon be. Marianne, Héloïse, and Sophie have traveled to a late night gathering of women, replete with alcohol, hallucinogens, and friendly banter. The setting resembles the underworld, their forms held by the gentle swirl of smoke and absence. The fire takes its time, licking up the heat, a slow combustion. Héloïse’s half grin extends a sly invitation. Marianne, the more reserved of the two, cannot hide the hungry want contorting her face. And then the burst! Their mad desire appears to be unleashed by an metallic hissing. It builds to a haunting chant performed by a ring of women, a weaving of polyrhythmic claps, serpentine harmonies, and Latin phrases. The first time music overwhelms the characters, the screen, us.
I love this scene so much. The center of the film, its heartbeat. I remember the sensation from the theater, like being put under a spell. Or finally french kissing your overripe crush at the end of a long, muggy night. A wily magic infuses the gathering (Sciamma wished to invoke witchcraft), and pulls forth the attraction pulsing between our two heroines. At the meeting of their gaze, the fire, symbolizing the delicious friction created by their looks. Héloïse stands before Marianne like a mirage, as if she is about to walk through the flames. An image to last for centuries. Is this how Eurydice appeared to Orpheus when he turned back? Turning to see your beloved eaten by gas. Evaporated. Marianne draws closer, her arm shooting out to help.
Followed by an abrupt edit to their arms holding on to one another as they maneuver down the cliffs towards the beach. The jump cut is odd and jarring. Just like memory. A fleeting intrusion. We are plunged back to the quiet of the island: the wind whipping against rock, the crunch of feet upon sand, the sway of waves, their breathing. Instead of their usual picnic, Marianne observes Héloïse walking into the dark of a cave, loosely invoking their mythical counterparts once again. In the moment leading up to their first kiss, the camera fully inhabits Marianne’s gaze, following the empty path created by Héloïse, as if in an ecstatic trance, as if already imagining the curves of her body.
“Do all lovers feel like they are inventing something?” Héloïse asks, her fingertips tracing new syllables along the contours of Marianne’s jaw. Within their heat-soaked world, anything is possible: armpits are sweaty erogenous zones, thinking is hotter than dreaming, and Eurydice directed Orpheus’s gaze. Portrait’s commingling of eroticism and creation brings to mind French-Canadian writer Nicole Brossard, whose writing centers lesbian desires and insists the erotic body is key to artistic expression. Similar to Portrait, in Brossard’s work, love is not a sentence, a punishment; it is a space to touch mouths to texts, fingers to memory. Sex is an extension of writing which is an extension of delirious remembering. Where a tongue connotes fucking and grammar, an instrument of pleasure, silence, and experimentation, as in this excerpt from Sous La Langue (Under Tongue):
You cannot foresee so suddenly leaning towards a face and wanting to lick the soul’s whole body till the gaze sparks with furies and yieldings. You cannot foresee the body’s being swept into the infinity of curves, of pulsings, every time the body surges you cannot see the image, the hand touching the nape of the neck, the tongue parting the hairs, the knees trembling, the arms from such desire encircling the body like a universe. Desire is all you see.
It’s hard to stop quoting Brossard. Her writing disrupts the rules of syntax and meaning-making, reinventing the world and the self via sensual wordplay, sapphic intertextuality, the feeling sentence. She explains in an 1981 interview with Broadsides, “You can vanish in a sea of silence or disintegrate in a patriarchal society. For me to use words is not only a matter of expressing myself, but also a way to produce a new territory, a new space, a new environment for my body.” Her words are translations of the skin, a reenactment of touch. While also, as Kate Zambreno observes, lamenting a look that will not return: “But the translation Brossard is obsessed with here is of a different sort, the translation of bodily memories, resurrecting old loves. For Brossard words cover the wounds.”
Painting seems to fulfill the same need for Marianne, a way of transferring what was and what could have been into the delicate strokes of sienna or emerald, a chimera summoned to pacify the gnawing lack. Her spell against forgetting. She will encounter Héloïse twice after their separation. First, at an art opening, where she submitted a painting of her own under her father’s name, a depiction of Orpheus and Eurydice after he turns, the poet frozen as his beloved is dragged back to the underworld. The last time occurs at the opera, a devastating scene, where the emotional focal point is the elastic landscape of a face, telegraphing joy, regret, ardor, delirium, though, never once looking back.
I sit on my balcony as I type this, snuggled into a shady spot near our spider plant and pothos, the rising heat kissing the bottoms of my feet. A humid embrace. In the large bushy tree across the street, a crow and mourning dove spar. Masked joggers huff by. A neighbor bounces a basketball off their yellow wall.It’s difficult to settle peacefully on the page. Words drip slow, dissipating into anxious mist before the chance to solidify. My thoughts run amok, cold to the touch. I try to concentrate on the cadence of my gaze. Instead I see a halo of fire, a choir of shadow voices, Marianne grabbing Héloïse by the arm. A line from Brossard comes barreling forward:
the poem can’t lose its momentum
make you suddenly turn around
as if the sea
were about to surge up at your back
in pages of foam and torment
Until next month,
Allison
Resources:
Free coronavirus testing for all LA residents
Headspace offering free access to its meditation app for LA residents
Fundraiser for Marcus Books, the oldest independent Black bookstore in the country
How to support the film industry during corona
How to help indie theaters workers and owners
Farmworkers Pandemic Relief Fund
List of Resources and Funds via WCCW
Playlist:
Sade - In Another Time
Alexandra Streliski - Overturn
Anohni - In My Dreams