Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Céline Sciamma on her ravishing romantic masterpiece
“Titanic is the hugest success, and it’s because it’s totally queer,” says the French filmmaker.
Few movies have ever hit me as hard as Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the new film from French director Céline Sciamma. (Read my review here.)
Sciamma’s unique talent for capturing the lives of women who are rarely placed at the center of cinematic stories might not seem to be a particularly strong fit for a period piece about an aristocratic woman dreading her
impending marriage.
But in the story of thebudding romancebetween Hélo?se (the aforementioned aristocrat) and Marianne (the woman who will paint her portrait), Sciamma found a way to talk about so much of the history that usually is left on the cutting room floor, of the women and queer people of the past who are too often pushed to the edges of the stories we tell about timeslong gone.
Note
- ravishing = charming = delightful = entrancing
- impending marriage = forthcoming = about to happen
- budding romance = just beginning and showing promising signs of continuing
- aforementioned = afore(before) + mentioned
- "left on the cutting room floor" : be cut out when film editing
- long gone: long time ago
The movie
is quietly radical inits gender and class politics,but it’s also wholly approachable. At one point when we spoke, Sciamma said she thought a lot about the movie Titanic while making her own film, and it shows. This is a classic love story, but one that hides considerable political depths.
Note
- sth. is radical in ... but it's also wholly approachable.
radical ~~激進(jìn)的; approachable = friendly/welcoming/open
There’s lots to talk about with Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is why I was so glad to speak with Sciamma when she visited Los Angeles (for the first time ever, she said) to attend the Golden Globes金球獎(jiǎng). (Portrait
was nominated forBest Foreign Language Film there butlost toParasite寄生蟲.) Ourconversation ranged all over the map, from lighting rigs to Greek myths. It’s been lightly edited for length and clarity.
To be continued...
