_Portrait of a Lady on Fire_; _Transit_
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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.
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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.
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