Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

directed by Céline Sciamma

Tyler Thier

I have a lot of shit to write—some merciful deadlines, some non-deadlines, all of it unpaid. It’s how I keep myself sane working on an empty campus all summer. Why am I starting on this one first? It’s the closest approaching deadline, the one I’ve been actively avoiding. It’s also the subject I understand least.

I can’t afford to pay for a streaming subscription that houses Portrait of a Lady on Fire, nor can I wait for it to be delivered to my university’s library or a local branch in my neighborhood. I’ve procrastinated too long for that. Just like I’ve delayed reconciling with a half-decade relationship that spiraled me through most of my college, grad school, and early “real job” years. A relationship that I can’t remember with clarity because I was severely mentally ill through its on-and-off-again flux.

Same deal with Céline Sciamma’s film, which I recall less in plot specifics and more in distinct images. Fitting, after all, as it foregrounds art. The titular portrait depicts a woman standing in a moonlit field, her dress spontaneously aflame. When I attended a screening back in 2019, in the calmness before COVID’s onslaught, I was drawn to this image, and the way Sciamma paralleled it with the film’s muse Héloïse. In my dissipated relationship, maybe this painting’s subject is me, maybe it’s her, maybe it’s the unreality—the mythic lie—we created together.

Reflecting now, it’s clear that the image’s relevance is the fact that no matter how passionately we claimed we loved each other, said we’d always be there for each other, declared we wanted to grow old together, we were always left feeling achingly alone, burning in a dark expanse. And yet still fixated on the promise ahead.

That promise never arrived. Like Héloïse and Marianne in the convent, external forces were always driving a wedge between us truly getting to know each other—you’d think five-plus years would be enough, but it was always long-distance, always ending and restarting, always overblown. She liked literature, vintage French stuff, and traveling, looking at stars on her parents’ summer-house lakefront, but she also insinuated that I was a creep for liking Euphoria. I liked paying for her all the time, traveling every weekend to have fleeting moments together (probably against her wishes), spending way too much time picking out the right gift that would feel special and not phoned in, but I also cried a lot and ended up in a psych ward the last time I ever saw her.

Things were falling apart even that day I took a long walk through Manhattan and ended at a screening of Sciamma’s film. I knew it was only a matter of time before the ghosting became permanent. Months later, when it actually did, I refused to accept it. Or maybe, not entirely accept it. Part of me did because I got myself on dating apps and started talking to someone who is now my fiancé. But in the midst of all the new, I clung to the old, to the ruins of a fantasy. I got a tattoo of the portrait of a lady on fire.

It's more minimalist than the artwork’s naturalist aesthetic. A moon engulfed by clouds, a woman in antiquated attire, a patch of grass on one side of her dress to make the impression of a larger field, and the flame on the other. Simple. Gothic. Sinister. A reminder of her on my arm, forever taunting me. What had I done?

With time, though, the tattoo was benevolent. The closing sequence is perhaps the best way to describe this transformation—Marianne, catching one of a couple ephemeral glimpses of her estranged love Héloïse outside the convent’s mirage, is at a music hall. Héloïse is on a balcony across the theater from her. The orchestra is playing music they connected with during their distant affair: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (long before it could be exploited as an alt-indie cover in a movie trailer). The camera lingers extensively on Héloïse’s face going through seemingly the entire spectrum of emotion as the music plays out.

This was her in my own relationship: a familiar specter, always silhouetted, out-of-reach even when we were closest, a voice from the past that contacted after months of silence, acting as if it was just yesterday that we were laughing and sipping on chai, a face awash with tears in the pit at the Alvvays concert, communicating that, like the lyrics being sung, things were coming to a close. Not right away, but gradually and painfully, with certainty, no matter how pathetically I tried to clasp it.

I’m stupid for getting a tattoo that reminded me of that doomed relationship, especially after it had shuttered for good. But I have to live with it, right? It’s beautifully done, and a reference to a great movie (five stars from me on Letterboxd, if anyone cares). It also is an uncomfortable reminder that everything about it was wrong. It was a toxic relationship—I never wanted to admit this, to give in to a buzzword as a label for something that felt so real in the moment, but I had no choice once it gave me the “itch” for more tatts.

I have one on my leg of the iconic image of Anna Karina snipping scissors across the frame in Pierrot le Fou, not because I saw that movie with my ex, but because it was the first time I ever visited an arthouse theater in NYC. I have one of a frog holding a knife, on the arm opposite the one bearing the portrait, because I love frogs and, well, don’t fuck with them. And finally I have one of a pitcher plant with a human hand trying to escape its bowels, on my thigh, because in the manipulative unreality of that bygone relationship, such a singular image that is so unabashedly me would never have been accepted.

It's doubtful that I’ll be able to achieve never seeing her again. I did my fair share of social media stalking—she has a new boyfriend. They live together. And they’re in the same city as me. Like Héloïse living a new life outside the convent’s walls, away from the desolation of that island, still present yet unknowable to Marianne apart from an idealized rendering.

I saw her boyfriend (I’m sure of it) with friends at a movie theater one time. My gut squirmed for a split-second expecting her to be there, but thankfully no. I have to remind myself that this is a momentary inconvenience compared to the deepest despairs of the relationship, when I’d text every two days hoping to get answers—only to hear back nearly 6 months later, thereby kickstarting the cycle over again. Compared to the long summers of silence, when I’d walk the bridge taking note of gaps in the fence and other points of exposure. Where I could jump when ready.

Tyler Thier lives in Queens, NY. He works in academia and as a freelance critic, and his writing can be found, among other places, in Senses of Cinema, Aeon, and Entropy. Frogs and carnivorous plants are about the only things in this life that he holds no criticism for.