1. The liberated fire of life
1760, Brittany, France
The maid holding a candle, led the female painter Marianne into the room, and lit the fire in the fireplace with the candle. Before the Industrial Revolution invaded this peninsula-shaped area in western France, the flame used to be equivalent to life or Divinity, just as the ancient Greek philosopher once compared life to a ball of living fire, the flame is also the main hidden role in the film, completing her first appearance.
The woman named Marianne opened the easel and sat naked by the fire. The back light from the road shone on her bumpy body, looming.
In "Portrait of a Burning Woman", the concept of "body" is everywhere. Just like Mishima Yukio's attempt to sophisticate the narrative, Celine Shiama put forward a radical idea through her own female identity. On the other hand, the soft image ontology—image is the body, and the pleasure of viewing is equivalent to the pleasure of touch. Touch can be sensual or emotional. Our cognition is open, and it can be invaded by a certain intensity.
The flame indicates the danger and temptation of touch. It is the instinct of life and death. The spirit in motion, at certain moments, it quickly sexualizes, just in the 47-second “touching” "Among them is the colorful round dance of flames and lifeless portraits, just as the film turns vision into touch. When the flames pass by the close-up of this headless portrait, the route of this movement deconstructs the distant view. The dizziness caused by the painting is expressed as a real, touchable body; the camera is accompanied by candlelight, trying to complete a not-so-standard ellipse, and then fixes it on the upper left corner of the body. As we recall, it was incompleteness that constituted beauty. In the next two shots, Marianne faced the fire in front of her. In the next shot, she stared at the face-erased portrait burning in the fireplace. This scene contains the sublime tension of tragic nature, the fire light shines on Marian's face, through the fire light, they are in each other for the first time.
This scene is a preview, and then, on the night of wild carnival, when everyone sings suddenly and silently, the long skirt of this young noble woman named Heloise (sounds like Eros, the god of love) Burning in the wilderness, a fleeting crystal moment was born. At this time, the exquisite flames placed in Peru began to release. From the campfire of wild carnivals to the long skirts, we can imagine that it will spread to the body and burn. The portrait of the young girl formed a baroque symmetry.
Afterwards, this group of flames toward the body was violently extinguished by people, just as the film depicts the disappearance of the girly state.
two. Looking back at Orpheus
Now, please listen to a story:
Classical period, Greece
After the death of his wife Eurydice, the young and talented piano player Orpheus, the son of the sun god, decided to take the Lyre to the Hades to rescue him. Hades finally agreed to his request, but made a condition: if You look back at her, and she will never be able to return to the world.
In the end, as he approached the world, Orpheus failed the test. When he turned his head, he heard a soft farewell, and Eurydice returned to hell.
Since then, the lyre could no longer come to open the gate of the underworld, and Charon, the messenger who ferryed the world and the underworld, did not want Orpheus to board the ship. He lost Eurydice forever.
The above is the melancholic story of Orpheus. In Cocteau’s version, this gaze is a mixture of the strangeness of modernity and the infatuation of the poet. In "Portrait of the Burning Woman", Orpheus and Euryth Dixie has become two "shes", but the question is, when Marianne tells the story to Heloise, who is the real Orpheus?
Assuming that in Orpheus’s story, he did not look back, but led Eurydice back to the world. He must find that the "Eurydice" behind him is actually no more than an empty shell, and Hades understands it. , This test is bound to fail. Compared with the greedy Sisyphus performing a meaningless stone pushing ceremony on Mount Olympus, Hades welcomes Orpheus into the Hades to satisfy and even accelerate his heroic game. Leading this stupid idealist to escape the duality of life/death and irreversibility implies that if one intends to destroy a certain arrogant self, it must be accelerated and conspired with it.
At the moment Orpheus looked back, he understood Hades’s invincibility and made an unexplained contract with it. In this quick glance, he found that Eurydice’s body had never been so beautiful. pass......
Similar to the story of Orpheus, "Portrait of the Burning Woman" is also a sad, even desperate story. Marian is not the sad Orpheus, but Heloise, who lonely compares herself to the cloth. In Lietani’s peninsula, the spatial landscape is her body. She is the incarnation of Eros. Because she comes from the monastery, the secular body can never form noble "love", and can only reduce her to the object of desire. , A currency that circulates continuously among libido; she tried to imitate the devout in the Middle Ages without having to practice asceticism. Therefore, when Marianne first tried to paint her portrait, there was a kind of contempt in her eyes, from The arrogance peculiar to a chaste girl.
Marianne is not exactly the incarnation of desire. Her approach to Heloise also comes from the desire for the spirit of aesthetics, or the inner, perfect woman, but in another sense, although she is not the other Endorsement, but it is a puppet of the big Other (secular law). Many people compare this to the female version of "Please call me by your name", but at the end of the Guadagnino film, the opposite is: itself As the subject of moral law, the father knew and encouraged Elio's homosexuality.
Foucault is keen to unveil the disciplines and punishments implicit in the social, medical, and psychological systems, while the "Burning Woman" is a gorgeous SM in a private world completely isolated from men. For 121 minutes of sex, or psychotherapy, Marianne induces, tramples, and even destroys Heloise’s body. Heloise’s eyes change from arrogance to desire, and then into a "rich man who has entered the secular world." "Mrs." image. The tragedy of Celine Sianma lies in the fact that this kind of privacy that has been accelerated to the extreme finally leads to the desire of the center of Phallus—the family world. When Marianne bid farewell to Heloise, she looked back and wore a wedding dress. Heloise of Eloise, if one fits with her inner aesthetic imagination, at this time, she finally becomes Orpheus, and Heloise is Eurydice...
Many years later, in the face of Heloise, who has been married and married, Marianne can still think of those summer days on the beach in Brittany, where a young girl quietly ended.
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