Writer-director Céline Sciamma’s entrancing historical romance about a young painter and her subject is a perceptive, erotic exploration of power
What a thrillingly versatile film-maker Céline Sciamma has proved to be. Having made an arthouse splash with the Euro-hits Water Lilies and Tomboy, she wrote and directed Girlhood (Bande de filles), a breathtaking portrait of modern “banlieue life” that completed her “accidental trilogy of youth”. Her impressive screenplay credits include Claude Barras’s My Life as a Courgette, a tenderly empathetic, French-Swiss stop-motion masterpiece that earned an Oscar nomination for its vividly resilient depiction of children in care. In each of these very different projects, Sciamma has struck an accessible chord by focusing tightly on specifics, finding the key to universal appeal in the unique, tiny details of each story and character.
For her fourth feature as writer-director, Sciamma ventures to a new world of the late 18th century. We first meet Marianne (Noémie Merlant, star of Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar’s Le ciel attendra) teaching life study in
Paris to art students, one of whom stumbles upon her titular painting. An arresting night-time image of a woman whose dress is hemmed with flames, this painting provides a portal to the past. Through it, we are transported back to Marianne’s stormy, sea-bound arrival at a remote Brittany residence where she is to paint former convent girl Héloïse (Water Lilies alumnus Adèle Haenel). Héloïse’s countess mother (played with imperious fragility by Valeria Golino) intends to send the painting to a Milanese nobleman; if he approves, her daughter will be wed and they will both be transported to a new life. But Héloïse has no desire to be married, and has already defeated one painter who left without ever seeing her face. So Marianne, who has been brought here on the pretext of being a chaperone and companion, must study and paint her subject in secret, looking without appearing to look…