12/30/2023 0 Comments A portrait of a lady on fireThere is danger in hyper-politicizing art sometimes, a rose is just a rose. It’s about who films are made for, and which narratives about gay women we choose to uphold. This choice permates all elements of the film: where a director like Kechiche might throw in a sultry sex scene, Sciamma cuts where a sensationalist screenwriter would include a melodramatic coming-out sequence, Sciamma refrains. She flouts the parameters of depiction epitomized in “Blue is the Warmest Color.” Instead, Sciamma utilizes the Female Gaze to create an enrapturing, empathetic portrait of queer romance. That “fuck ‘em” dogma carries through to Sciamma’s rejection of the Male Gaze in her own work. She replied, simply, “I don’t give a fuck. Recently, an interviewer with “The Guardian” asked Sciamma about the film. Perhaps “Blue is the Warmest Colour” is gay in terms of content, but with its sans-queer creative team, blatant objectification of women, and fetishization of lesbian sex, it seems more a vehicle for exploitation than representation. Its success exemplifies a certain formula that allows lesbian stories to succeed - so long as they conform to mainstream heterosexual narratives. Nevertheless, “Blue is the Warmest Colour” garnered widespread critical acclaim and a firm place in the queer cinematic canon. And this hyper-sexualization extended into the film’s production: Kechiche reportedly fostered an on-set environment so hostile and degrading that it made one lead actress feel “horrible… like a prostitute.” The application of the Male Gaze was so heavy-handed that the author of the original story remarked, upon watching the final product, “It appears to me this was what was missing on the set: lesbians.” It is an adaptation repelate with protracted sex scenes and imbued with heterosexual fantasy that borders on pornographic. Take, for example, “Blue is the Warmest Colour,” a 2013 French romance by Abdellatif Kechiche. And when they do, the result is often disappointing: popular lesbian movies tend to cater to stunted, sterotypical conceptions of female homosexuality. And according to the Inclusion Initiative, just over 34% of speaking characters in top-grossing movies - straight or not - were women. Let’s set the scene with some statistics: In 2019, women directed only 19% of the top 100 grossing films (source: Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film). “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” dares to tell a lesbian love story through the eyes of the women living it. But it’s also one of the few mainstream movies about gay women that doesn’t filter itself through a heteronormative lens. Yes, it’s a period piece about two white ladies in an “aristocratic-world-problems” pickle. Perhaps this plot doesn’t seem revolutionary. The catch? Héloïse isn’t keen on the idea of sealing the deal with man she’s never met, so Marianne must paint surreptitiously, posing as a companion, taking in Héloïse’s form through stolen glances as the two take long walks on the picturesque seashore. The story is set during the 18th century on a remote French island, where Marianne (Noémie Merlant) has been commissioned to paint a portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), so that Héloïse’s mom (Valeria Golino) can marry her daughter off to a Viennese suitor. The French film, which was written and directed by noted lesbian filmmaker Céline Sciamma, is a queer, feminist cinematic masterpiece that portrays the firey romance of two women through the Female Gaze. It reduces women to sexual objects, relegating them to roles that serve only to fulfill men’s desires and narratives (think superfluous nudity, manic pixie dream girls, or the plot of every movie produced in the 1980s).īut “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” is different. The Male Gaze, a term coined in 1975 by Laura Mulvey, describes the way in which mainstream film depicts the world from the point of view of a straight man. Few films depict lesbians, and when they do, the characters are often hypersexualized or killed off - in short, lesbian stories are overwhelmingly molded by the Male Gaze. Historically, cinema has not been good to gay people.
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