Céline Sciamma lets us notice attraction before her characters put it into words. We rate her patient, tender cinema highly, though her control can leave scenes feeling a little too carefully arranged.
Fi1m perspective
An artist studies a woman for a portrait, and finds herself being studied in return. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Céline Sciamma makes this simple exchange absorbing because neither person has sole charge of what it means. A look can be professional scrutiny, attraction or the uncomfortable recognition that somebody has noticed more than we intended. We were moved by the tenderness with which Sciamma lets their attention become mutual, before either woman needs to explain it. The pleasure is in noticing the change ourselves, at the slow pace Sciamma insists upon.
Her earlier films put that close attention to work on younger characters, with Water Lilies (2007), Tomboy (2011) and Girlhood (2014) forming a loose coming-of-age trilogy. The settings and questions differ: adolescent desire around synchronised swimming in the first, childhood gender nonconformity in the second, a Black girl's life in the Paris suburbs in the third. The move to a period romance in Portrait of a Lady on Fire changes the setting without abandoning her interest in women discovering what they want. With Petite Maman (2021), childhood returns to the centre, alongside grief and mother-daughter bonds.
Across her work, Sciamma has returned to collaborators including cinematographer Crystel Fournier, composer Para One and actor Adèle Haenel. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Haenel and Noémie Merlant make the director's patience pay off. Sciamma, who also wrote the screenplay, gives their characters professional judgement and curiosity as well as attraction. This matters because a romance so dependent on looks could easily leave us admiring two faces and waiting for something to happen. The performers give us enough to notice that the slow pace seldom feels like an imposition.
The reservation is that Sciamma sometimes seems to have decided too precisely what each look should tell us. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the restraint can feel over-managed; we would welcome an awkward moment that had not been so carefully prepared. We still recommend it warmly: the tenderness earns the attention it asks for. Start there, on an evening when nobody needs the romance to hurry.
Biography
Céline Sciamma is a French filmmaker. She was born on 12 November 1978 in Pontoise, Val-d'Oise, and studied screenwriting at La Fémis from 2001 to 2005.
Her debut feature Water Lilies (2007) originated as her graduation project; Xavier Beauvois, who chaired the evaluation panel, encouraged her to direct it. She has since directed and written Tomboy (2011), Girlhood (2014), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and Petite Maman (2021). Sciamma also wrote the screenplay for the animated film My Life as a Zucchini (2016) and contributed to other projects including Paris, 13th District (2021).
