The Male Gaze and The Female Gays: An Analysis of ‘The Gaze’ Theory In Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of A Lady On Fire
Buckle up to talk about what I consider not only the most romantic film I’ve ever watched, but also the most feminist one.
Buckle up to talk about what I consider not only the most romantic film I’ve ever watched but also the most feminist one. Please watch it before you read this piece. Not only to understand it better but because your whole week will be made with such a beautiful masterpiece.
"The first feminist gesture is to say: Okay. They’re looking at me. But I’m looking at them. The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but by how I see them.” – Agnès Varda
Eighteenth-century France. A woman paints another woman’s portrait. For that, she has to watch her, to look at her closely. What she does not realize, though, is that her muse, her model, is watching her back. French director Céline Sciamma wrote and directed the 2019 film Portrait de la jeune fille au feu (or Portrait of a Lady on Fire), about a romance between two French women in the late eighteenth century. Sciamma, a lesbian woman herself, has publicly stated that this film is a “manifesto of the female gaze.”
What is “the gaze”? Ways of Seeing is a written adaptation of a 1970’s TV show of the same name by British art critic John Berger, who taught the audience how to analyze paintings. The key idea for the gaze, according to him, is that “The principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. But he, by definition, is a stranger—with his clothes still on.” (Berger: 1973: 13).
Feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey picked up on Berger’s gaze theory and applied it to film. In her essay Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema, she coined the term “the male gaze”, which theorizes that, in Hollywood films, the controlling gaze is always male, and that the magic of Hollywood lies in its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. However, this manipulation was mostly done unconsciously, according to her, which is why she based her theory not only on Berger, but also on psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. According to Freud, the unconscious plays a crucial role in the way we internalize the laws and beliefs of our society. Although these laws and beliefs are themselves subject to cultural change, they have historically laid the foundations of patriarchy. This makes psychoanalysis indispensable for feminism. His term phallocentrism is also central to understand Mulvey, which is used where there is a social privileging of the masculine perspective—which applies not only to men, but to people of all genders who subscribe to this.
The most important concept by Freud to understand before explaining in detail Mulvey’s theory, though, is the fear of castration in men. He explains that men depend on the image of the castrated woman--when they are babies and see a woman without a penis, they assume they have been castrated, which frightens them-- to give order and meaning to the patriarchal world. Films deal with castration anxiety by either punishing women, saving them, or by fetishizing them. This will be further explained soon.
Now, the male gaze theory is divided into two main elements. First, the spectator of a film identifies with the male hero or protagonist. To further understand this, we need to mention Lacan, for whom the unconscious is structured like a language. Mulvey further developed this, saying that the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form (1975:14). Lacan said that when we are babies, we have a “mirror stage”, which is the moment where the ego is formed. The baby looks at itself as an ideal ego—perfect, complete and in control—at odds with its actual experience of its body, which is uncoordinated and helpless and speechless (Lacan 1993:2). Human beings are haunted by this idealized image of themselves throughout their lives. Think about it: when you, the spectator, are sitting in the cinema, your awareness of yourself as a separate entity dissolves, you become that baby again. You identify with the glamorous star on the screen a conventionally beautiful white man, and his hopes, dreams, desires, and pursuits. It is just like a baby looking at themselves in the mirror for the first time, imagining the person in the mirror as more complete and perfect.
As it was mentioned in the introduction, Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire subverts the male gaze tropes. First, we have to consider that there is not a single male character in the movie. There’s no man with whom the spectator can identify as the hero or protagonist, not even Heloise’s potential fiancé. He is sort of omnipresent in the film, though, some sort of force that pushes Heloise’s actions to one side or the other. Maybe not him specifically, but the patriarchal expectations of having to be in a heterosexual marriage and procreate.
There is another character that does represent the patriarchy in the film, yet it is also a woman. It is Heloise’s mother, the countess. She is the one who insisted for Heloise to leave the convent where she was in to marry a Milanese man. The only reasons we see in the film for this are that she loves Milan and the Italian spring. This is a selfish love, which will later be contrasted against Marianne’s selfless love to Heloise. Furthermore, there is a scene where the maid, Sophie, tells Marianne that she is pregnant and wants an abortion. Marianne asks her why hasn’t she performed it yet, to which Sophie responds, “I was waiting for Madame to leave so I could take care of it”. Hence, the countess represents capitalism and patriarchy. However, she is very secondary in the film. She only has a few lines. Hence, it’s not a patriarchal character with whom the spectator identifies in this film, either, but with two lesbian women: Marianne and Heloise.
The second element of the male gaze theory is the making of female characters as a passive object of erotic spectacle. Freud coined the term ‘active scopophilia’, which is using another person as an erotic object, and in which the subject’s identity is different from and distanced from the object on the screen. The female character plays a traditional exhibitionistic role—her body is held up as a passive erotic object for the gaze of male spectators, so that they can project their fantasies on to her. She connotes “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey 1989:19). Not only that, but the vision of the man is aligned with the camera work, one of her main examples are shot reverse-shots where the man looks, the woman is displayed, and then we see again the man looking. This means that the woman is subjected by a “controlling male gaze” (Mulvey 1975:6).
Men, then, are the agents of the look, who control and possess women on screen. In Hollywood, the heroine is usually filmed in soft focus, coded for strong visual and erotic impact (Mulvey 1989:19). Her body is also “butchered”, which means there are close-ups of parts of her body, instead of showing her whole body, showing her as a whole human being. She’s valued for her appearance. These moments of contemplation halt flow of narrative to invite erotic contemplation and shattering the illusion of depth rather than enforcing verisimilitude (Mulvey 1989:20). The next time one watches an old Hollywood film, one could ask themselves: how many shots of male heroes butchered can one find? They usually happen only if the shots concern narrative events, for example, the male hero’s broken leg in Rearview Mirror.
Back to Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma was careful not to butcher the two women’s bodies, even in their sex scenes. We can see Marianne at the start naked, yes, smoking a pipe, but she’s in a casual, non-sensual pose. The same can be seen when both Marianne and Heloise are lying naked in bed together, their poses are completely casual and natural, even unflattering. They even have unshaven armpits, defying the beauty standards that today’s patriarchal society has for women. Sciamma isn’t seeking men to desire her characters, she just wants people of all genders to see what an actual lesbian love scene in the eighteenth century could have been like. She doesn’t focus on their bodies’ sensuality but on Heloise’s and Marianne’s emotions, which I will further discuss in the following pages.
So, when women appear on screen, they halt the diegesis, or the flow of the movie, and we are encouraged to possess them with our gaze. However, their appearance is simultaneously threatening because they signify castration. Mulvey proposes that film helps men escape this fear in two ways. First, they do this by reenacting the trauma through voyeurism (precisely, “sadistic voyeurism”), investigating the woman and revealing her guilt (i.e. her castration), then either punishing, or saving her. Second, they disavow castration through fetishism, i.e. looking at her with extreme aesthetic perfection, so they will not focus on the missing penis, but makes her reassuring instead of dangerous. It’s interesting to think about fetishism in theory. For both Karl Marx and Freud, fetishism has to do with value, specifically, overvaluing something (or someone). Marx coined the term “commodity fetishism”, in which abstract values come to be invested in things, and how their origins as products of labor or social relations are disavowed. For Freud, fetishism ascribes excessive value to objects considered to be valueless by common consensus (Mulvey 1996:2). Hence, this second way of dealing with castration anxiety in cinema is by overvaluing a woman. When Freud talked about fetishistic scopophilia, he defined it as a love of looking. When the camera butchers the actress, into idealized parts, it’s showing her like a goddess, which is also dehumanizing.
Back to Portrait of a Lady on Fire, at the arrival of Marianne at Heloise’s house, the latter’s mother, The Countess, tells her that Heloise “refused to pose” for the previous painter, as she did not want her portrait to be sent to a man she did not know, and having to end up marrying a stranger against her will. There is power, then, over her, if she is the object of looking, and she knows it—the power of a man, both the suitor and the painter. Heloise resists her objectification by refusing to pose. The portrait that Marianne has to paint can be seen as a representation of Heloise’s subjugation to a man’s gaze: her potential suitor, and before, to the previous painter as well, who was a man.
Marianne, then, has to paint Heloise in secret. Heloise’s mother told her that Marianne was there to keep her company, to go out on walks with her. While they do this, Marianne tries to take in every detail of Heloise’s face and body, without her knowing, and then goes back to paint her in secret at night. The scene where the two meet is interesting. Heloise is running, her back to Marianne, as she had not been out of the house in a long time and was happy to be so. She was wearing a black hood. Marianne is visibly desperate to see her new model’s face, but she only sees her when Heloise allows her to, when she finally turns around, out of breath, and locks eyes with Marianne. Sciamma writes the following in the screenplay: “She looks at her. Quickly. The eyes are blue. The nose is rounded. The jaw square, sculpted. The lower lip is full. But again, the face disappears as the young woman turns. When someone is so beautiful, such evasions have a powerfully dramatic impact.”
During their walks, their faces are protected by scarves that expose only their eyes[1]. This makes Marianne’s endeavors more difficult, who has to memorize Heloise’s traits to paint her. Marianne studies her every little moment she can see her face. She narrates to her students in voice-off: “As much as possible, you must render the entire ear and study its cartilages well, even if you have to paint hair over it. What determines its shapes must be of warm and transparent color, except for the hole in the middle which is always robust. Its skin tone, even in light, must generally give way to the light of the cheek, which is more prominent.” (Sciamma, 2019).
So, this relationship of looking starts without consent. It’s almost like voyeurism. To me, it even feels like raping with the gaze. It reminds me of paparazzi with a celebrity. These interactions also remind me of the phrase “to steal a glance”, which connotes a lack of consent as well. The face is the most important thing for the portrait, though, and it’s what Heloise lets Marianne see the least: she’s always covering it or always walking in front of her.
I also wonder how much we can blame Marianne. She is a working-class French woman who has to make ends meet with her painting commissions. She is not an aristocrat, like Heloise. So, she needs this money from the portrait, even if she has to do it without the model’s consent. Perhaps this is one of the ways in which Sciamma criticizes capitalism in the film, showing that it can pity us against each other and pervert our morality for money.
It’s important to clarify that “gazing” does not carry the same meaning or connotation as just “looking” in film theory. The “gaze” is a specialized academic term that bears the weight of its predecessors (Berger, Lacan, Sartre), not just about the faculty of vision. Gender Studies scholar Elizabeth Grosz writes, “many feminists have conflated the look with the gaze, mistaking a perceptual mode with a mode of desire. when they state baldly that “vision” is male, the look is masculine, or the visual is a phallocentric mode of perception, these feminists confuse a perceptual facility open to both sexes with sexually coded positions of desire within visual (or any other perceptual) functions.” Similarly, Mulvey had written “for an erotically charged “look” to be an instance of “the gaze”, it needs to reflect larger structures of power.” (Mulvey 1975: 19). However, in this film both are relevant to analyze, as the act of looking in both Marianne and Heloise depicts an entire world of emotions and dynamics between them, as will be further explained in the following pages.
Another important element of this movie is the memory of love, something that Sciamma mentioned in an interview with the Motion Picture Association that she wanted to explore in this story. Looking and remembering how someone looks, and who someone is, is a central part of the movie. In this film, Marianne is teaching her students anatomical painting while reflecting on her relationship with Heloise out loud to her students. It’s about the power of memory, and the images that linger in their minds.
Marianne paints a lot from memory in this movie. So, the gaze is not just in the eyes, one can also see their loved one through memory. We see her closing her eyes, trying to remember all of Heloise’s factions to paint her. In one of the later scenes, they have the following dialogue:
Heloise: “I know the gestures. I imagined everything while waiting for you.”
Marianne: “You dreamt of me.”
Heloise: “No, I thought of you.” (Sciamma, 2019)
When they know that their relationship won’t last and that the painting will be sent to Milan, they strive to memorize each other’s features and habits before they lose sight of one another forever.
In their last scene together, Heloise asks Marianne to turn around and look at her one last time. Marianne finally sees Heloise in a wedding dress. This image haunts her for life. Also, throughout the movie, Marianne is haunted by a vision of Heloise in a wedding dress, but when she turns around to look, Heloise vanishes. This is an analogy of Orpheus and Eurydice’s myth, which they had read aloud together one night, where the latter asks the former to turn around to look at her before they left the underworld and went back to the world of the living, and, in turn, she disappears forever for having broken the only rule that Hades had asked him not to do. They have the following dialogue:
Marianne: “He’s making a choice.”
Sophie: “What choice?”
Marianne: “He chooses the memory of Eurydice. That’s why he turns around.”
Heloise looks at her, waiting.
Marianne: “He doesn’t make the lover’s choice. He makes the poet’s choice.”
Heloise: “Maybe she was the one who said to him: ‘turn around’.” (Sciamma, 2019)
Likewise, at the end of the film, when Marianne is leaving the property to go back home, Heloise asks her to turn around. Marianne does and sees her one last time. Sciamma writes in the screenplay, “She sees the final image of Heloise, which we recognize. The ghost from the corridor. The white dress, the pale complexion, the sad look and the shadow that falls on her: that of the door closing.” (Sciamma, 2019). This echoes another moment of the film, when Marianne tells Heloise, “Don’t regret. Remember.” In remembering, there is a picture in our minds.
Why is this important? Sciamma is recognizing an element of the gaze that is not directly explicit: we can still see someone when we close our eyes, in our memory. This can be controversial, as well, as someone can be fantasizing about another person, rendering them as a sexual object in the quiet of their thoughts, for example. The morality of these situations is greyer, though, but Sciamma is using the idea of picturing a lover in our minds, seeing them in our heads even after they are gone, to emphasize how powerful vision can be in humanizing or dehumanizing someone. This also reminds me of a scene in the third act when Marianne is making a tiny portrait of Heloise for herself with pastels, and the latter tells the former that one day she will think of that picture instead of thinking of Heloise herself.
In the final scene of the movie, Marianne goes to an opera and notices Heloise on the other side of the theater, also watching the show. During Vivaldi’s Summer Presto, we see Heloise with her eyes closed, breathing heavily and crying. We know, of course, that she is thinking of Marianne. Not only that, but she is also looking at Marianne in her memory, with her eyes closed. Marianne’s voice-off goes on to say, “she didn’t see me”, but we know that is not quite true, she was, in fact, seeing her in her mind. So, here, just like at the start of the film, Heloise did not know that Marianne was looking at her, but in this case, she in fact was also looking at Marianne, only in a different way, but at the same time. It is like an alternation between the object of gaze, like in the scene when she explains to Marianne that just as she’s looking at her when she’s posing, she’s looking at Marianne when she’s painting, and they both simultaneously learn about the other.
Now, one might ask themselves, “if there’s a “male gaze”, could there be a “female gaze”?” It’s complicated. Many people online assume that it’s as simple as just switching genders: a film that shows male characters as sexual objects of desire. Countless blogs have proposed Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 film “Magic Mike”, a blockbuster about male strippers with conventionally attractive muscular men, to be the “female gaze”. However, this attempt does not quite work, as it is a film written by men where the male characters drive the story. Also, while it is true that the male characters’ bodies are displayed in an erotic fashion for the female character’s contemplation and pleasure, if we see the camera work, they are usually shot/reverse shots of men looking at the other men. And they are not homosexual men looking at the others with lust or desire, they are looking at them with admiration. Even if it were a woman filmmaker who wants to fetishize male bodies as strippers, she would still be using the same language and techniques that male filmmakers use to create a gaze upon female bodies. Hence, it can be called “the male gaze” regardless of who is being objectified. Also, could we have a real female gaze when the dominant power structure is still patriarchal? So, are there other options?
The biggest and most relevant attempt so far to create a female gaze theory—relevant to this paper because, as I will argue, I reckon Sciamma based Portrait of a Lady on Fire on it—is Joey Soloway’s female gaze theory. Joey Soloway is a non-binary filmmaker who gave a masterclass at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2016 about how filmmakers can create a unifying female gaze. “We’re essentially inventing the female gaze right now—not just myself, but also showrunners like Jenji Kohan[2]. We’re trying to show sex and desire from a female vantage point, and my ultimate hope is that I can inspire women, queer and trans people everywhere to join in and tell their truths about desire, identity and sexuality from unconventional perspectives.”
Their theory, though, is less about formal structures of film, like the ones Mulvey examines, but about auteur theory. The author is not dead for Soloway, they would disagree with Barthes and postmodernism. The author has to be a woman, or any gender that is not a cisgender male, for a film to embody the female gaze. Joey Soloway asks how the female gaze in filmmaking can provide insight into the lived female experience. For this, they outlined three concepts, mimicking Laura Mulvey’s original triangulation of the male gaze (spectator, filmmaker, actors). First, the “feeling camera” or “bodies over equipment”, wherein emotions are prioritized over action. The body shows emotions. Second, the “gazed gaze”: this shows the spectator how it feels to be the object of the gaze. Third, “returning the gaze” is what Soloway explains as “I see you seeing me” and “how it feels to stand here in this world, having been seen our entire lives.” (Soloway, 2016)
Let’s now examine how Sciamma uses this alternative theory to subvert old Hollywood’s male gaze. The first element (the “feeling camera” or “bodies over equipment”, wherein emotions are prioritized over action) is crystal clear in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Soloway proposes transferring emotions from the director and crew to the audience through their art. They define “feeling seeing” as “a subjective camera that attempts to get inside the protagonist.” (Soloway, 2016)
How does Sciamma apply this theory? She is interested in the emotions that Marianne and Heloise convey with their facial expressions or body language as a whole. She, for example, focuses the camera on Marianne’s whole face while she paints, documenting closely every micro-expression she might have that signals concentration, admiration, or infatuation to Heloise. The camera also focuses on their expressions when Marianne, Heloise, and Sophie are playing a card game in the kitchen. They smile not just with their mouth but with their entire face, even their head and shoulder movements. Sciamma describes their emotions in the screenplay as “childlike excitement” in this scene (Sciamma, 2019).
Additionally, the screenplay makes this more obvious in another scene. When they had not confessed their love to each other yet, there was a moment when Heloise told Marianne that she had missed her one day that they had not been together. Sciamma wrote the following sentence in the screenplay after said dialogue: “This sentence goes straight to Marianne’s heart but Heloise doesn’t see it.” (Sciamma, 2019). Marianne had her back to Heloise, so she had not been able to notice the former’s facial expressions. This not only shows how important emotions are for Sciamma in this romance, but the importance of looking, of seeing the other to understand them.
The third example, which I think is the clearest and most intense one, is the final scene of the film--the final take, to be exact. Years had gone by after the two lovers had separated, Heloise was married with children to the Milanese man, but Marianne sees her from afar at an opera house. The orchestra starts playing Presto from Vivaldi’s Summer, which Marianne had played for Heloise back in the day—a tender moment as Heloise said her favorite thing about having been in a convent was listening to music, even though she could not play any instrument. Sciamma wrote the following in the screenplay:
“Heloise initially reveals a troubled face at the first bars of this long-cherished piece. We get imperceptibly closer to her face during the three minutes of the movement. This face experiences the dramaturgical unfolding of the music as she hears it, transfixed by its generous rise in power. There is everything, there is the surprise, the exaltation, the pounding of the heart, the expectation, the melancholy, the concentration, the flush that rises to the cheeks and the breath that deepens. All the attitudes of a woman we have known well and loved to watch. Whom we simply loved. But there are also things that we didn’t know about her and that we are discovering. Maybe because they are new things, like that wrinkle in the corner of her eye. Maybe also because they are things that we didn’t know how to see and remained to be understood. When the piece reaches its exhilarating finale, Heloise stands up, happy, revealing the last and the most alive of all her faces.” (Sciamma, 2019).
It is difficult to put into words the work that the actress Adele Haenel (who plays Heloise) has put into this scene. The camera shows her sitting down in one of the many seats in the middle of a crowded opera house, and we see all these emotions in her face, trying to picture what she must be feeling while, quite obviously, seeing Marianne in her mind and remembering their time together. I have not met anyone yet who has not said that they have not cried with this final shot, with this performance, with all this emotion that was shown only visually, without any words being said.
Emotion and passion, both intertwined, are the core of the movie. Hence the title, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. The fire motif is present throughout the film. It represents passion, desire, an intense romantic emotion that burns throughout the years, even after their separation.
Furthermore, Sciamma does not try to further manipulate emotionally the spectator with a score. Music is barely used: only in the scene where Marianne plays Vivaldi’s Summer for Heloise, and when they are in a bonfire with other women from the area chanting a song in Latin. Visually, she transmits all the emotion needed—whether by the cinematography and the balance of cool and warm colors, or by the actresses’ performances and the emotion they showed in their facial expressions and body language. It makes sense, then, that their first kiss happened after them only looking at each other, without having said a word. Both were able to read the other’s expression and know that their feelings were reciprocated. It was like giving consent only with their gazes, a beautiful contrast to Marianne’s non-consensual gazes at the start of the film.
When Marianne finally confesses to Heloise that she had been painting her portrait in secret, and that she was done, a crucial conversation between them both came up. First, Heloise tells her, “So that’s what that was. All your staring.” It’s heartbreaking, considering that Heloise was attracted to Marianne, for her to realize that Marianne stared at her so much not with a loving reason (at least that’s what she thought at the moment, because when Marianne confesses, they had not professed their love to each other yet—they were still friends only), but for an economic one. She felt betrayed and, naturally, objectified. The following dialogue while they are both watching the painting gives us more insights into Heloise’s mind:
Heloise: “That’s me.”
Marianne: “Yes.”
Heloise: “That’s how you see me.”
Marianne: “It’s not just about me.”
Heloise: “What do you mean it’s not just about you?”
Marianne: “There are rules, conventions. Ideas.”
Heloise: “You mean there’s no life.[3] […] That it’s not close to me is something I can understand. But that it’s not close to you, that’s sad.”
Marianne: “What do you know about it? If it’s close to me. I didn’t know you were an art critic.”
Heloise: “I didn’t know you were a painter.” (Sciamma, 2019)
What follows is Marianne destroying the painting, by disfiguring Heloise’s face. The countess, shocked, asks her for an explanation, to which she replies: “It wasn’t good enough. I’ll start again.” (Sciamma, 2019).
There are two reasons here behind Heloise’s (and, in turn, Marianne’s) dislike of the painting. It’s not really Marianne’s gaze, but an attempt to strip Marianne’s emotions or her way of seeing Heloise to just please the male gaze--her potential Milanese suitor. But also, Heloise confronts the idea of sticking to conventions of the art world, for an artist to make their art the way they are expected to by institutional rules. This, again, comes down to emotion and its centrality of the movie. Like Berger said, “The way the painter has painted her includes her will and her intentions in the very structures of the image, in the expression of her body and her face.” (Berger, 1973:9).
Hence, the following portraits that Marianne makes have her own emotions and inner world in them, not just the model (and collaborator). The following portrait was made with Heloise’s help, then, she made another painting where Heloise’s dress catches on fire in the bonfire, another small portrait of Heloise to carry with her, a self-portrait for Heloise to remember her after their separation, and, finally, a portrait of Sophie having an abortion. Marianne here was in front of a real-life situation, filled with much pain for Sophie, and was pushed out of her comfort zone to paint something this painful and emotional, which makes her grow as an artist. Heloise actually tells Marianne to look at Sophie while the latter is getting her abortion procedure done. To not look away in horror, not only to further understand life and women’s struggles but to comfort Sophie with her gaze, probably.
This is also why Sciamma emphasizes the process of creating art (and a relationship), instead of focusing on the end result. There is a moment when Heloise asks Marianne, “How do you know when [the portrait] is finished?” To which the latter replies, “At some point, you stop.” (Sciamma, 2019).
After Marianne destroys this first portrait, Heloise later agrees to let her paint her. So, Marianne starts a second painting. Heloise teaches Marianne how to look at her, and even grabs the paintbrush over her hand and they paint Heloise together. The screenplay says the following:
Marianne: “Sorry I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Heloise: “You haven’t hurt me.”
Marianne: “Yes I have. I see it. When you’re emotional you do this with your hand.”
Marianne suits action to word and puts her clenched fist against her own face. Heloise experiences her own attitude, mirrored.
Heloise: “Really?”
Marianne: “Yes”
Heloise lowers her gaze and touches her forehead.
Marianne: “And when you’re embarrassed you look down, like this. And you touch your forehead. And when you’re annoyed you don’t blink.”
Heloise: “You know everything.”
Marianne: “Forgive me. I would hate to be in your place.”
Heloise: “We’re in the same place.”[4]
Heloise (cont’d): “Come here.”
Marianne joins her behind the easel.
Heloise: “If you look at me, who am I looking at?”
This is similar to a common statement of female filmmakers wanting to subvert the male gaze, they have their actresses look directly at the camera, as telling the spectator “I’m looking at you looking at me.” This happens often in the TV show Fleabag, about a woman, made by a woman (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). However, Sciamma has a more romantic take of the “gazed gaze”. It shows that they truly see each other, that they know each other well. The script goes on the following way:
Heloise stares directly at Marianne, who evades her gaze. Marianne nervously bites her lips.
Heloise: “When you don’t know what to say you bite your lips.”
Marianne stops biting herself, as soon as Heloise points it out. Heloise leans her face towards her.
Heloise: “When you’re afraid you clench your fists.”
Marianne remains silent with her mouth parted.
Heloise (cont’d): “When you’re upset you breathe through your mouth.” (Sciamma, 2019).
So, Marianne does not just look at Heloise, she does not just gaze at her erotically either, dehumanizing her, seeing her as an object for her own erotic spectacle, as Mulvey noted about old Hollywood films. Neither is the spectator invited to do so. Marianne truly sees Heloise in all her humanity, with all her mannerisms and flaws and virtues. It's all the little things that makes each person themselves that they see in the other. Love, not only the devil, is in the details.
Going back to Heloise helping Marianne paint her portrait, we see that now, not only there is consent in the gaze and in the creation of an object that represents Heloise, but also collaboration in its creation. They are co-creators. This reminds me of postmodernist literary theory, specifically reception (or reader-response theory), where both author and reader work together to create meaning of a work of literature. It’s interesting how artists have power over the people they portray—which reminds me of the aforementioned quote of John Berger about the painter including her will and intentions in the very structures of the image. Being a co-creator in her own portrait, Heloise is not a passive female character, they are both spectator and subject instead of spectator and object. This is important because Mulvey noticed how it has always been men who drive the story forward, while women are passive characters, just a spectacle. One of the clearest examples of this is Sleeping Beauty, the movie is about her, but she just sleeps, and things happen to her, instead of her making them happen. We always think about an artist and their muse when we think about art, and Sciamma wanted to get rid of that idea with this film. “Of course it’s me and Adèle[5] and of course it’s talking about the idea of the muse. But it’s subverting it, getting rid of it. Portrait is saying that there’s no such thing as a muse. It’s only collaborators inspiring each other,” she told The Guardian. Not only the art they create, but even their relationship, is collaborative.
We can also see the idea of equality clearly when Heloise tells Marianne “We’re on the same place”, and in telling each other the other’s mannerisms. In an interview with the British Film Institute, Sciamma stressed the importance of equality when she cast Noémie Merlant to play opposite Adèle Haenel, how she specifically wanted both women to be on equal footing with each other even down to the age and height.
There is also empathy in the act of both looking and gazing when we consider that Marianne used herself as a model when she was painting Heloise secretly, by putting on Heloise’s green dress that Marianne had chosen for the portrait and sitting on the bench where Heloise would have to sit. The screenplay reads, “She assumes a number of postures while scrutinizing her reflection which defines the possible framing of the eventual painting. She tries out several hand positions, crossing them, uncrossing them. Finally, she straightens her torso and freezes in place. She strikes a pose. At length.” (Sciamma, 2019). To make her point even clearer, what Sciamma makes happen next is Heloise knocking at the door, Marianne hiding the easel and tools behind a curtain, and when she opens the curtain again, she sees Heloise sitting on the bench. Here, Sciamma writes in the screenplay, “Marianne comes out from behind and finds her: with her hands folded on her knees, her corseted bust. The very image she had hoped for.” (Sciamma, 2019).
It is perfectly in character, then, seeing how Marianne recognizes Heloise’s humanity (and collaboration) during the painting of the second portrait, in which Heloise poses for her, and asks for her consent every step of the way. “Are you comfortable? Do you think this is a position you can hold?” she asks her (Sciamma, 2019). In the first scene where Heloise poses for her, Sciamma writes in the screenplay “Marianne resumes her work, unsettled by the sudden generosity of the model, who offers herself for the first time.” (Sciamma, 2019). Notice how she still uses the word “model” here, as it was just the beginning of their collaborative work and Heloise had not yet started to (at least, explicitly) help in the co-creation of the work. This was not a new behavior for Marianne, though. In the opening scene of the film, we see Marianne’s students (all female) looking at her, and then back at their canvas, while painting her portrait. Marianne is posing, sitting on a bench, instructing them to “take a look at [her].” (Sciamma, 2019), and proceeds to give them directions on how to visually analyze different features of her own. So, Marianne knew what it meant to be a collaborator as a model, which even strengthens the empathy with Heloise (and the way she sees her as a human being instead of an object of desire) in the moments when she poses for her. It is not a surprise, then, that when the second portrait is finished, they have the following dialogue:
Heloise: “This time I like it.”
Marianne: “Perhaps because I know you better.”
Heloise: “Perhaps I have changed too, since then.”
Marianne: “Perhaps yes.” (Sciamma, 2019).
Now, is Soloway’s female gaze theory the solution for telling women’s stories in fiction? For some critics, their theory is also deeply problematic. In the queer studies journal Jump Cut, scholars Nicole Morse and Lauren Herold criticize Soloway in that this theory is both binary and essentialist at its core: there is a “division between men and women, masculine and feminine energies, violence and nurture, recalling stereotypes or clichés about the theories associated with second-wave feminism” (Morse 2021:2). For example, Soloway has declared:
“The male gaze ... necessarily divides us.... The wounded masculine divides us to feel power and when we reclaim that, we repair the divided feminine by speaking and having voices and by picking up the camera.... The world, the matriarchal revolution, is dependent on female voices and speaking out loud. Please keep making things.” (Soloway, 2016)
So, if we want to apply Soloway’s theory as filmmakers, we do not have a formal, aesthetic, or traceable way to do so, to resist patriarchal dominance; we have to resort to having female bodies and voices making the film. For them, this includes everyone except cisgender men, however, they have also associated womanhood with stereotypical experiences of cisgender women, like menstruation or a deep emotional world. Back to Soloway’s “feeling seeing” concept explained a few pages back, it emphasizes that it is “a subjective camera that attempts to get inside the protagonist.” Even though they don’t clarify how a “subjective camera” is produced and traceable in the finished project (Morse, 2021:2), they just expect a reaction from the spectator that they describe in the following way: “I can tell a woman wrote and directed it because I feel held but [sic] something that is invested in my FEELING in my body, the emotions are being prioritized over the action.” (Soloway, 2016)
However, Sciamma seems to be aware of these issues. "My work has always been about not being conventional and male gaze is convention," she said in an interview with IndieWire. "It's not just because I'm a woman behind a camera, because women can actually reproduce male gaze, because that's our education. I think my movies are very much about the female gaze. ... But it's not going to happen magically if you're a woman. It's still something you have to deconstruct, but it's not something you have to be vigilant about. I don't have to think, 'How am I not going to objectify this woman?"
I wonder, then, if we should seek a unifying female gaze and for what purpose. Why should we create a collection of formal structures and aesthetics (or of cliches) and say, ‘this is the way a film represents the female gaze’? It would be difficult not to fall on stereotypes of traditional femininity or of people assigned as female at birth. Could it be enough to learn the male gaze theory, how old Hollywood has objectified women through a series of formal structures, and try to both avoid it and subvert it in our own creative ways? Personally, I agree with film critics from The Take’s take on how to subvert the gaze theory: “Why don’t we just learn to “look respectfully? To acknowledge the personhood of who we desire?” (The Take, 2021).
Finally, this is not Marianne’s story, it is Heloise’s story—her portrait, if you will—told through the lens of Marianne. Hence the name of the film. A woman telling the story of another woman, whether by her portrait—a second one she made where Heloise’s dress is on fire, depicting their evening in the bonfire—or by oral storytelling.
In conclusion, I think Portrait of a Lady on Fire successfully subverts the male gaze that Mulvey noticed was so present in old Hollywood films, and that we still find in many contemporary ones. Sciamma has apparently also tried to incorporate Soloway’s female gaze theory to create a love story between two women who see each other as equals and who learn how to respectfully look at others, not only in art but in life. To do this, she has avoided shots that show the women as sexual objects of desire but has strived to show their humanity through their emotions. Furthermore, she has made a statement on how powerful the gaze can be in both oppressing and liberating people, even at times when one is not directly looking at a person, but just picturing them in their mind or through a work of art. So far, this is the most feminist film I have encountered.
Bibliography:
Berger, John. *Ways of Seeing*. British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1973.
Brooks, Xan. "Céline Sciamma: ‘My Films Are Always About a Few Days Out of the World’." *The Guardian*, 2021, https://theguardian.com/film/2021/nov/14/celine-sciamma-petite-maman-interview-girlhood-portrait-lady-fire.
Erbland, Kate. "‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ Filmmaker Céline Sciamma Is Trying to Break Your Heart." *IndieWire*, 2019, https://www.indiewire.com/awards/consider-this/portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire-filmmaker-celine-sciamma-interview-1202193537/.
"Joey Soloway on The Female Gaze | MASTER CLASS | TIFF 2016." *YouTube*, TIFF Talks, 11 September 2016,
King, Loren. "Portrait of a Lady on Fire Writer/Director Celine Sciamma on Her Masterpiece." *Motion Pictures Association*, 2020, https://www.motionpictures.org/2020/02/portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire-writer-director-celine-sciamma-on-her-masterpiece/.
Lacan, Jacques. *Ecrits: A Selection*, translated by Alan Sheridan, Routledge, 1993.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema." *Visual and Other Pleasures*, MacMillan, 1975.
Sciamma, Celine. *Portrait de la jeune fille au feu (Screenplay)*, 2019.
St. James, Emily. "Portrait of a Lady on Fire Director Céline Sciamma on Her Ravishing Romantic Masterpiece." *Vox*, 2020, https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/2/19/21137213/portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire-celine-sciamma-interview.
Stevens, Isabelle. "No Man’s Land: Céline Sciamma on Portrait of a Lady on Fire." *British Film Institute*, 2022, https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/no-mans-land-celine-sciamma-portrait-lady-fire.
"The Female Gaze - Yes, It Can Exist." *YouTube*, The Take, 12 June 2021,
[1] In the 18th century, particularly in France, it was a common fashion trend for women to cover their faces with masks or scarves when in public. This practice was prevalent among women of higher social classes and was often associated with the concept of modesty and etiquette.
[2] Jenji Kohan is a female showrunner of the popular Netflix TV series Orange Is The New Black, about a female prison in the United States
[3] Previously, in the screenplay, Sciamma had described the portrait the following way: “It is faithful to the model and to convention, well executed, sober.”
[4] Another meaning can be that they are both women in a patriarchal society, so they are both in the same place of inferiority.
[5] “Of course it’s about me and Adele” specifically refers to Adele Haenel, who plays Heloise and had been Sciamma’s romantic partner and interviewers asking Sciamma if she was her muse.