This geographically interesting film - the islands of Brittany, where waves crash against the sands and cliffs of the coast, reconstruct the mythology with the local hydrology... From every tiniest element of the film, "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" all manifest an aesthetic completeness. Admittedly, this completeness is not entirely friendly, and on some levels it certainly creates a "sophistication" much criticized by the audience. The film tells the story of a painter who depicts the beauty of her female lover; and the film uses a whole set of mature lens designs to describe the gaze relationship between the two (artist and object, "me" and lover) , completed an exceptionally detailed text that discusses the relationship between "seeing" and "being seen" - the text here, in addition to those discussions in words, I also refer to some plot-level designs, such as the painter will frequently stare at Héloise and so on; and when we consider how the film goes to great lengths to portray a woman who even set fire to her skirt, and mentions ancient Greek mythology, we can't help but feel how much this flawless narrative is. It hurts her nameless, utterly unreasonable beauty that the film wants to show.
However, the film is not surprising. In the process of watching, it is hard not to notice the extraordinary cherishing and love of Héloise's image by the camera - does the camera represent the painter's gaze? It doesn't seem to be exactly... This mechanical eye is hidden behind the "painter's perspective", but we strongly feel its own admiration and even desire for Héloise. The most wonderful scene in the film: the first time the artist sees Eloise, it is her back in a black cloak, without showing her face first; what's more, she sprints forward without looking back , the camera follows her closely, and then her hood comes down with her jerky strides, revealing her blond hair—the one the artist had heard of before—for a moment so shocking, The viewer will feel completely how the camera (that is, the painter) is overwhelmed by her image; on the other hand, the camera is very careful not to show the process of her change as a subject, but always the result of her action as an object. For example: Eloise walked into the living room of the painter for the first time, her figure did not appear in the camera at all, but only showed an empty mirror (full of transcendence); then the painter hurriedly took off the green dress, Pulling the curtains and stepping out, we borrowed her eyes to see Héloise sitting in the center of the model chair, like a living painting, and it's heart-wrenching. There are countless examples of this, such as not filming the process of her turning her face, but directly showing her staring at us after the painter's counterattack, and so on. In short, when Hanel appears in the camera's gaze, he is always treated as a supreme object, like a visitor from heaven, completely out of the camera's comprehension. Every time the camera sees her appearance, she seems to be extremely surprised, which makes her image appear in an absolute novelty and novelty every time, so that people are instantly convinced in front of her image. . This amazement, almost a touch of guilt and grief, lingers intensely throughout the film until it culminates in a bonfire. However, being looked at by the camera with such cherished and admiring eyes, the image of this woman is also inevitably in an extremely dangerous and fleeting state at the same time - but the novelty of the image is not exactly what it is Is it so fleeting? Just like the fairy who fell into the underworld in myth.
It is worth noting that the mythological narrative contained in the film does not only exist at the level of text; it re-writes the myth of Orpheus at the level of camera and image. An image of structuralism: Orpheus descended to the underworld to find his wife, unable to suppress his desire to turn back, so that his wife fell into the abyss of the underworld forever. The three women discussed intensely and explained with great insight: Orpheus voluntarily chose the memory of his wife, which was the poet's choice. Héloïse believes that Eurydice's last-minute cry seduced Orpheus. After this intriguing discussion, the camera begins to recreate the myth. Burning skirt corners - Héloïse's elegant and calm look, the shock and sudden appearance of the image (épiphanie), the painter suddenly grasps the image world outside the phenomenal world, and love comes from it... By the beach, Héloïse suddenly disappears from sight , the painter looked around, and the camera started a slightly surreal, suspenseful and thrilling subjective shot, slowly pushing along the trajectory of an inhuman pace into the semi-open cave formed by the reef, no one's perspective Héloïse suddenly appeared in the middle, with her usual resolute and fateful look; Eurydice in the underworld: she followed behind Orpheus, but there was no sound, and the rest of the underworld σκίαι makes no difference, it's just horrible. But Orpheus's memory of his wife was at this moment unprecedentedly beautiful, and it had a fatal attraction to him. (When Eurydice dies, the fairy is no longer just herself, she alienates into some kind of transcendental being between Eurydice and Persephone, so her charm is multiplied.) The desire to look back comes from the dual attraction of fear and beauty. Sure enough, what was drawn out by this terrifying scene was: the two began to kiss. This rocky space on the beach is interesting, as if it were the gates of hell, an image repeatedly vividly depicted in ancient Greek and Latin—and Italian, of course (the gates of hell in the Divine Comedy are undoubtedly the most Classic: "Through me, into the city of pain... and I am also immortal, living forever") - in the film, it is on the uninhabited coast of Brittany, in the sound of the waves, Half-naked in the skylight. To interpret the gate of hell as a semi-open space? Incredible! And how romantic and original... So what we see is: a deep fear of the loss that is to come, the loss that is implicit in the universal destiny of all women, because of the beauty of the lover; not only The intention of death must also be integrated with some kind of huge, unfathomable abyss space (the underworld).
In the film, the camera attaches great importance to the female image, and this "seeing" gaze makes the whole film almost shrouded in a terrifying breath of death. Even though the story is about the painter's eroticism for Héloïse's image, the viewer is drawn to the camera's eroticism. A non-predatory, and thus effectively refuted image of the male gaze. Of all the criticisms of the film's feminist hypocrisy, the most common one is the emergence of the concept of "utopia." The film has made a huge weakening and neglect of men. From the very beginning, until the moment when the dream is broken at the end, only a few words of men appear. The whole island is like a woman's Eden, with wild flowers flourishing and the little maid embroidering plants on her handkerchief. Is a film that completely suspends men, as if men do not exist in the world, enough to constitute a legitimate feminist film? The truth is, the legality of "feminine" cannot be so simply characterized. Under normal circumstances, we always see that feminist films inevitably establish the inner core contradiction in the turmoil that dominates the external world and the inner and outer world that she desires to rest, heal and produce as a woman. Confrontation, sexual intrusion are out of place; but "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" has its own peculiarities. It just tells about some of the moments when women are in this earthly light: they inadvertently get rid of the subordination of the secondary sex, and at the same time as a woman, they are no longer the subordinate gender that is suppressed, but the dominant gender. , briefly fulfilled her dream of rest, and came to the moment in paradise. Therefore, the core contradiction of the film is not, as shown in the story, that Héloïse is about to marry a man he has never met and go to Milan, where he does not understand the language; it is not the contradiction between the paradise and the external turbulent world, but the female The contradiction between paradise and its own essence—the contradiction between love and beauty that is fleeting and incomprehensible, the contradiction between paradise and Hades.
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