Set against the backdrop of 18th-century Brittany, a forbidden love stirs between two young women, a painter and her reluctant subject. Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is commissioned to paint Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) the beautiful daughter of a noblewoman. Upon her arrival, Marianne discovers that the previous artist failed, and that Héloïse refuses to pose in protest of being showcased for an unwanted marriage. Ostensibly hired as a ladies’ companion, Marianne takes daily walks with Héloïse, observing her closely yet discreetly, without letting on she’s secretly working on a portrait when they’re apart. As she struggles to make progress on the painting, she finds herself growing more and more attracted to Héloïse.
Made in an elegantly classical style, director Céline Sciamma’s (Girlhood; Petite Maman) romance turns into a remarkable work of suspense, as tension slowly builds over transient glances and pauses — rendered beautifully by Merlant and Haenel’s passionate performances. The deeper they fall in love, the closer Héloïse’s impending loss of freedom looms in this tragic drama about imposed social limitations on what we can create, how we can live, and who we can love.
When Sight & Sound magazine unveiled their 2022 Greatest Films poll of academics and scholars, Portrait of a Lady on Fire was the highest new entry in the list, coming in at #30.
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will feature a 20-minute introduction and talkback.
Aug 17: Intro by Mila Zuo, Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film, UBC
Mila Zuo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at UBC. Her research areas include transnational Asian cinemas; film-philosophy; abject and enchanted epistemologies; star studies; digital and new media; and critical theories of gender, sexuality, and race and ethnicity.
A devastatingly unforgettable story of love and memory [[…] Razor-sharp and shatteringly romantic […] A profoundly tender story about the process of self-discovery and becoming. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a period romance that’s traditional in some ways, progressive in others, and altogether so damn true that it might feel more like staring into a mirror than it does running your eyes over a canvas. The film expresses that discovery as vividly as any that’s ever been made, as the drama’s spartan backdrop only adds to the intensity of its blaze. An unforgettable film that cooks at a low simmer until going incandescent in its closing minutes.
David Ehrlich, Indiewire
An exquisitely executed love story that’s both formally adventurous and emotionally devastating… It’s so good you’ll want to watch again in slow-motion immediately afterwards just to see how she does it. […] Not a moment in this film is wasted, which suits a story about lovers without a moment to lose.
Leslie Felperin, Hollywood Reporter
Portrait of a Lady on Fire demonstrates Sciamma’s ability to make a timelessly beautiful film that also crystallises the gender politics of her era.
Ginette Vincendeau, Sight & Sound
Céline Sciamma
Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luana Bajrami, Valeria Golina
France
2019
In French with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
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Credits
Screenwriter
Céline Sciamma
Cinematography
Claire Mathon
Editor
Julien Lacheray
Original Music
Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, Arthur Simonini
Production Design
Thomas Grézaud
Also in This Series
The greatest films of all time.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
Kicking off our 2026 Pantheon series of the greatest films ever made, Lars von Trier's 1996 masterpiece is a devastating melodrama featuring an indelible performance from Emily Watson as the woman whose love for her husband knows no bounds.
Antonia's Line
This month's Pantheon selection spotlights the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris, and her charming, vibrant tale of an emancipated farmer who refuses to conform.
Sansho the Bailiff
The third of the great Japanese masters (with Ozu and Kurosawa), Mizoguchi is a poet of suffering. There's plenty of that here in his exquisite telling of an ancient folktale about the enslavement of a woman and her two children.
The Leopard
Lampedusa's elegiac account of a 19th century Sicilian aristocrat, Prince Salina, fading into history is one of the pinnacles of Italian cinema, an epic which influenced the tempo and gravitas of The Godfather, Age of Innocence and The Deer Hunter.
Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
