Portrait of a Lady on Fire directed by Céline Sciamma
Released in 2019, Portrait of a Lady on Fire carries the special credit of being the newest
movie on this list. I tried to keep in check as much as possible any recency bias, but this movie
has just haunted me so thoroughly that I simply couldn’t deny it any longer. A young painter is
commissioned to make a wedding portrait of the reluctant bride-to-be without her knowing, but as they orbit each other in mutual observation, a spark ignites, and grabs hold of the two women in
that all-consuming and quietly terrifying way that only love can do. Suddenly, nothing else matters
anymore. There is only the tension, and the anticipation. A world reduced to stolen glances
and careful gestures of growing affection. Every inch forward is of cosmic significance, slowly
opening yourself up until the threshold is finally passed, at which point, the built-up longing comes
pouring out in such ecstasy that you wonder why you ever hesitated at all. The brief but intense
romance beautifully demonstrates that to love is to expose yourself, it is to take a leap,
and that’s exactly what makes it so significant, so important. For as philosopher Allan Watts
also observed, what love does is, it creates virtue out of vulnerability, and transforms our
greatest weakness into our greatest strength; But this is the most powerful thing that can
be done. surrender, see? And love is an act of surrender to another person. Total abandonment. I give myself to you. Take me. Do anything you like with me.
The revelation is not just transformative for the relationship between the two characters, but also
for our understanding of love in general, of that strange power that feels like it can re-shape the
entire structure of our soul; not just fulfilling a longing but deepening it, leaving you at once
satiated to the core with pure beauty and life, and hungry for more, desperate for more. We reach
out to each other as if we’re touching infinity, and it obliterates us, leaving us forever changed.
In trying to articulate this intangible impact that other human beings have on us, it was
philosopher Emmanual Levinas who perhaps put it best when he wrote; “The relationship with another
puts me into question, empties me of myself, and does not let off emptying me […] The desirable
does not fill up my desire but hollows it out, nourishing me as it were with new hungers.”
It’s love as the ultimate humanizing force, and as an act of creation, too. Sciamma beautifully
subverts the traditional set-up between painter and subject in which one is the muse to the other,
to instead depict an equalized playing field; the portrait containing not just that which is given
by the subject, but also that which is given by the painter. A mutual surrender, an ideal that
Sciamma extends to her setting at large. For out there, the world is one of inequality, of
hierarchies that will probably end up defining the actual circumstances of our lives. But in here,
love is a safe haven; everyone is treated with the same amount of respect and dignity. In here,
is the world that we truly inhabit, and that we carry with us in our hearts wherever we go.
