Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Director: Céline Sciamma

2019 / 122min / DCP

Set in late 18th-century France, Sciamma’s acclaimed queer period romance, luminously shot by Claire Mathon, concerns the blossoming romance between a young aristocratic woman (Adèle Haenel), engaged to be married, and the female painter (Noémie Merlant) who’s been hired to surreptitiously observe her in preparation to paint her portrait. “[A] subtle and thrilling love story… unsentimental in its realistic assessment of women’s circumstances… Less a chronicle of forbidden desire than an examination of how desire works [and] the dangerous, irresistible power of looking.”—The New York Times

Part of Visionary Auteurs: Five Decades of mk2