Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2019) ***1/2
Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2019) is a very good film, written and directed by Céline Sciamma. I greatly enjoyed most aspects of it. It's a critical darling, was nominated for and won a bunch of awards, and it's an audience favorite. I don't ever aim to be a naysayer but I don't quite share the same passion for it, at least after a single viewing.
POALOF is an incredibly handsome-looking film. It was shot in 8K, so, while it's nice that The Criterion Collection released the film on Blu-ray, it really deserves an 4K Ultra HD disc (and Criterion really needs to catch up to other boutique labels and start releasing UHDs). I watched the film on Hulu, so it looked quite nice but the darker scenes suffered, as well as some of the colors, brightness, and details, naturally. I would love to revisit the film in 4K, purely to marvel at the technical facets.
The languid pacing and cinematography of POALOF call to mind Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick, though, while I rarely find myself bored with films by those directors, I'm afraid that was the case with this film on a few occasions. At times the costumes, textures and hair stylings in Portrait reminded me of Polish Art Deco artist Tamara de Lempicka's portraits—fitting as one of the lead characters in this film is commissioned to paint a portrait of the other lead character. Both Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel give strong performances—the repressed (and eventually expressed) desires are tangible. But there were times where I found myself asking how necessary the Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) character was—she felt like a cipher, merely functioning to lead Marianne and Héloïse from one scene to another.
POALOF left me feeling much the same way I did after seeing Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread (2017) (my reviews here and here). That is to say, I highly appreciate and respect the filmmaking but the story itself doesn't wow me. Sciamma's film operates similarly to PTA's, where outside of the fact that it's a lesbian romance, it feels like a pretty basic period piece—the type of film that the arthouse crowd goes gaga for and that I'm a bit more tempered about. I recognize that my perspective will not be the same as that of the queer viewer. As with Phantom Thread, I will likely give Portrait another watch to see if it clicks more with me.
POALOF is an incredibly handsome-looking film. It was shot in 8K, so, while it's nice that The Criterion Collection released the film on Blu-ray, it really deserves an 4K Ultra HD disc (and Criterion really needs to catch up to other boutique labels and start releasing UHDs). I watched the film on Hulu, so it looked quite nice but the darker scenes suffered, as well as some of the colors, brightness, and details, naturally. I would love to revisit the film in 4K, purely to marvel at the technical facets.
The languid pacing and cinematography of POALOF call to mind Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick, though, while I rarely find myself bored with films by those directors, I'm afraid that was the case with this film on a few occasions. At times the costumes, textures and hair stylings in Portrait reminded me of Polish Art Deco artist Tamara de Lempicka's portraits—fitting as one of the lead characters in this film is commissioned to paint a portrait of the other lead character. Both Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel give strong performances—the repressed (and eventually expressed) desires are tangible. But there were times where I found myself asking how necessary the Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) character was—she felt like a cipher, merely functioning to lead Marianne and Héloïse from one scene to another.
POALOF left me feeling much the same way I did after seeing Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread (2017) (my reviews here and here). That is to say, I highly appreciate and respect the filmmaking but the story itself doesn't wow me. Sciamma's film operates similarly to PTA's, where outside of the fact that it's a lesbian romance, it feels like a pretty basic period piece—the type of film that the arthouse crowd goes gaga for and that I'm a bit more tempered about. I recognize that my perspective will not be the same as that of the queer viewer. As with Phantom Thread, I will likely give Portrait another watch to see if it clicks more with me.
Comments
Post a Comment