• _Portrait of a Lady on Fire_; _Transit_

    From septimus3 NA@21:1/5 to All on Sun Mar 1 16:03:27 2020
    _Portrait of a Lady on Fire_ is just as I feared, a high-concept film
    which is too on-the-nose but is praised to the sky, like Jane Campion's
    _The Piano_. Even the English title evokes Campion; the French
    title is _Portrait of a Young Girl on Fire_, more age-appropriate for
    the Heloise character (Adele Haenel) who is plucked out of a convent
    to marry a Milan nobleman (replacing her sister who has likely thrown
    herself down one of those famous Brittany cliffs that Claude Monet
    painted). Her mother (Valeria Golino) hires a lady painter Marianne
    (Noemie Merlant) to surreptitiously render Heloise's portrait, as
    an 18th century facebook ad for the prospective husband.

    I spend most of the film's run time thinking that the two leads should
    have switched role. Heloise supposedly hides from a previous portraitist,
    and in the first 20 minutes her face is hidden from the audience. But
    Haenel is one of the most photographed faces of French cinema! There
    is little mystery to her features. Noemie Merlant is just a month older
    but looks much more fresh-faced; she has the chiseled features of a
    convent girl, an angular face that Goya would have loved. Haenel is
    a world-class beauty but there is not an ounce of classicism, or the
    Baroque period, in her furtive movements and languid postures. (She
    also walks like a 2nd Lieutenant.) The cinematography is excellent,
    the maid looks like she has come out of a Reuben religious allegory,
    but the muscular Haenel seems hopelessly miscast as object of desire
    by an older, more experienced artist. Haenel and director Celine
    Sciamma are supposedly ex-lovers (they also collaborated in _Water
    Lilies_). That seems the only reason. While I'm on the subject --
    Melanie Laurent's _Respire_ is orders of magnitude better than
    Sciamma's _Water Lilies_ with a similar subject matter.

    For a film supposedly about two artistic souls, the dialog is surprisingly
    weak and pedestrian. It is only when they read the Orpheus and Eurydice
    story that they do not sound like callow millennials. (The Orpheus saga
    is the film's main subtext.) There is little reason given for Heloise
    and Marianne falling for each other; no back story is given. Has
    Marianne always been attracted to her lady models? Is Heloise just
    lonely and looking for an escape? Other oddities include the complete
    lack of jewelry in the portrait and on their persons; not even after
    marriage does Heloise don a necklace. The film ends with Heloise
    crying to Vivaldi's "Summer" concerto (which Marianne plays for her
    once). But Vivaldi is almost forgotten by the 1770s (the setting of
    this film), not rediscovered until the twentieth century.

    It is all too bad. I just saw Haenel in _One Nation, One King_; she
    is excellent in those kind of extroverted role. Her best work comes
    about when cast against type -- as the demure, vulnerable daughter in
    _In the Name of My Daughter_ and as the screwball comedy heroine in
    _The Bloom of Yesterday_. She would have been great as a modern-before- her-time painter in this film.

    --------------------------------------------------------------------

    Christian Petzold is another director being put on the pedestal these
    days. His _Transit_ is actually not bad, once I get over the fact
    that Nina Hoss is no longer around to anchor his films. Paula Beer
    looks a bit like Hoss but is a poor substitute (although she is great
    in Ozon's _Franz_). The lead actor Franz Rogowski plays another Franz's
    prison friend in _A Hidden Life_; here all Marseille is his prison
    in this Franz Kafka-like story adapted from a novel. I guess Petzold is
    at his best as a fantasist; my favorite film of his is _Jerichow_,
    which also starts with some contemporary theme (capitalism there rather
    than immigration crisis) and make a dream-like fantasy out of it.
    _Transit_ reminds me a bit of _Last Year in Marienbed_ and _Hiroshima
    Mon Amour_. The Marguerite Duras writing style is making a come-back,
    although Emmanuel Finkiel's _Memoir of War_ is far superior in that
    sense.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)