Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Conversation with the Romantic Outline of Titanic
What makes a great love story? When the characters fall, they fall hard. This sweeping, hard to fight infatuation is what makes romance engaging, and the blows that are dealt to make love a challenge are what makes it impactful. The bones of this story come down to two people whose love we find believable but fantastical, a bit of movie magic that makes us believe they are the only ones that’ll work quite that way, larger than life, and whether sweeping or gently understated, fiery and passionate or healing and transformative, we desire to be loved this way too. When describing the language of love, ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ director Céline Sciamma says “You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs, you have this anecdote that’s going to make you laugh three years later. It’s this language that you build. That’s what you mourn for when you’re losing someone you love. This language you’re not going to speak with anybody else.” Her idea of love is reflected in her cinematic language, and though she pulls from great love stories the world already knows, she fills them with her own language built from life. These personal reflections are what makes the feelings of loss and love so strong in her period epic, and it is these small intimate gestures that we mourn for in the end.
‘Titanic’ is perhaps cinema’s widest seen love story. Holding the box office record for years, the fictional story of Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a poor travelling artist, and Rose DeWitt (Kate Winslet), an upper-class English girl engaged to a man to whom she does not wish to be married, falling in love during their short time onboard the legendary Titanic before its real-life sinking is widely engrained in pop culture. ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ is a tender, intimate lover’s dilemma, set over the course of a few short weeks on an island in Brittany as Marianne (Noémie Merlant) must paint a portrait of the reluctant-to-be-wed Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) without her knowing, as they fall in love through the gazes shared between them before the painting is finished. The two share parallels, but the latter received critical acclaim with little awards, compared to ‘Titanic’’s clear and present impact on the zeitgeist.
Of course, Céline Sciamma‘s two hour picturesque response isn’t the first time ‘Titanic’ has been reclaimed by lesbians, many growing up in the height of its popularity citing Jack Dawson as their first “crush” due to his androgynous, boyish appeal. Young Leonardo DiCaprio was all the rage, and an easy celebrity for young lesbians to claim as a male interest, as his fashion and demeanor resembled that of many soft butch lesbians in the era, and at a glance, his “pretty-boy” face could almost be mistaken for female. In T Kira Madden’s memoir ‘Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls’, she tells a story about asking a talking toy to call her Leonardo. She says her mother’s response was “it’s because of that boy in ‘Titanic’, she loves him”. Even if as a lesbian she didn’t love him the way a heterosexual woman would, she wants to be him, to move through the world in his place and sweep the trapped heiress longing to see the world from her husband-to-be’s clutches. ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ doesn’t purely rewrite ‘Titanic’’s arc as two women, instead acting in parallel to juxtapose a changing world, and how that forbidden love between artist and active subject is shaped by the ways of society in its day.
Two women lay in bed, under the gaze of an artist, the camera more concerned with the smiles spreading across their faces than their exposed chests. One woman poses with the heart of the sea pressed against her heart, her lover sketching the curve of her breast with teasing intimacy. Another lays with a sheet around her lower half, and a mirror propped between her legs for her lover to see herself reflected back. Marianne sketches herself between the pages of a book to preserve the memory for her lover, while Jack’s sketch of Rose, originally just for them, is what awakens strangers to their memories onboard the ship. They recline on a pillow, softly lit, and Rose asks Jack to “draw her like one of his French girls”, which is implicit for the two women residing in France, but their scene plays homage.
We see both Jack and Marianne reflected back in glass, resting over the soul of their lovers. The diamond over Rose’s heart reflects Jack faintly, but the focus is on the glamour, as they are divided by her wealth and his freedom in the lower class. Class for them is clear, as they are first and third class aboard the ship respectively, easily divided by the many levels. Jack’s image leaves a faint resonance on the glamour of the diamond, he is a small facet upon this world of the wealthy, even if Rose does not see him as such. The mirror between Héloïse’s legs only possesses an image of Marianne, as any further image of Héloïse will be like the portrait they had worked on together, which is just as much an image of Marianne as the artist as of Héloïse. The question for them is not their difference in social class, but Héloïse’s slipping identity, since she is always treated as belonging to another. Though each bit of glass is part of a beautiful turning point in a romance, each represents the central argument against their love, whether it be class difference or the danger of being possessed by another.
Love isn’t always going to be there to hold our hands and carry us through it. Love ebbs and flows, and sometimes, even when it is right, it leaves far too early. Jack drowns in the icy waters, lips blue and smiling ever so slightly up at the girl he would die for. Rose grows old without him, seeing all of the world, flying a plane above where he had grown up, and has children she is never quite able to tell about this time in her life. Héloïse is raffled off to her unknown suitor, a cruel fate binding her to a stranger who will never know her, and Marianne creates her art school, hiding the painting she uses to recall this time with her lover. Héloïse has a daughter, and sits for her portrait again, finger on the page she’s never able to forget. Though that chapter of her life, with all of its freedom, is as gone as Jack is, the memory never leaves her side, carried in his surname she takes to become Rose Dawson in her new life.
The image of one lover grasping the other from behind, a desperate embrace, is a moment of finality whether conscious or not. At the bow of the ship in the sunset, Rose’s arms are outstretched as Jack holds her from behind, hand supporting her chest in a gesture lifted from Leos Carax‘s ‘The Lovers On the Bridge’, and the two don’t realize that, as the narration says, this will be the last time they’ll see daylight together on the ship. Marianne and Héloïse know the reality of the ticking clock that numbers their days together, so when Marianne runs to Héloïse on the beach to tell her that her mother is returning, there is hardly a moment of surprise, only desperate, gasping breaths as tears come, because the two know it all is actually ending. This consciousness of the limited time may be Sciamma’s closest acknowledgement to the societal complications that come with the lesbian nature of ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’‘s central relationship.
While Jack and Rose dream of running away together, of changing identities and fitting in with the rest of society and fighting Rose’s engagement, Héloïse and Marianne never consider this, Héloïse even directly refuses to resist in this way as she knows the effort that’ll come with hiding and fighting back would drive them apart. One of the most beautiful aspects of the film is that it never allows any shame for the characters being two women in love, so they choose to not resist in a manner that would make this beautiful love an object of shame. Héloïse especially knows this from the start, while Rose is living in a world where there is a precedent of escaping the restraints of societal position for her love, so Rose is painfully naive to this embrace being her last, while Héloïse chokes back tears because she can count every minute she has left with her lover, even if neither will actually die.
Seeing the end of a love story before it begins sets the viewer up for heartbreak. When Marianne speaks to her art class about the painting, the titular ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’, there’s a sad look in her eyes, one of lost love, and we know this is not someone who is still in her life. When Rose is brought onboard the submarine in modern times, her older self is pulled from a life that does not include this mysterious young man at the start of her story onboard the ship. We know neither story will end with the romance we crave so dearly intact, so why do we watch? We watch for the ride, and for the lesson on what the world does to beat down these lovers, and to see just how much the tenderness of a short time together can change someone. The first meeting, this idea of love at first sight, is even to her with a promise of death, with both Héloïse and Rose standing at a precipice, with precedent to jump. Héloïse is marked by the fate of her sister who had leapt from the cliffs, but we are less certain that Marianne does stop her, while Rose may seem too caught in the dramatics to actually jump from the deck of the ship, Jack clearly saves her from herself. The escape for them is less easy than it is for Jack and Marianne in their freer places within their class, so the final nature of death is sadly more reasonable as an escape from their troubles.
Jack and Rose are parted by class. Jack’s lower social class leading to his arrest, the attacks by Rose’s fiance, and his struggles to board a lifeboat all are major factors towards his being left in the water, and if he had been first or second class on the ship, it’s hard to believe he would be in that same position, freezing in the water clinging to the door. Marianne and Héloïse are not of the same social class, but Marianne’s role as a painter puts her in constant contact with the upper class, to the point where she is accepted to fully walk among them, to sit beside them in an opera house. Their Achilles heel is instead gender, as Rose has the slightest freedom to later escape her fiance when two centuries of progress allows her the luxury of being asked her name by an officer on a rescuing ship, while Héloïse is powerless to resist without being fully driven out of society. The gender issue is not that her lover is a woman, but that a woman in Héloïse’s position was not presented with a way out of marriage. Héloïse has done better than others in avoidance, as she has already driven away the past portrait painter to buy herself more time, but her request that Marianne stay to try again is the nail in her coffin when she chooses the opportunity of potential connection over further resistance. For Héloïse, resistance always has a limit (even if she had found it for a time as a nun before her sister’s death left her her fate), while Rose is able to resist in singular acts that will build her a new life.
For Héloïse and Marianne, their love story starts officially the evening after their first kiss, when Marianne sees a vision of Héloïse in her wedding gown flash before her eyes as she walks to her bedchambers. This image is the last time they both see each other, but instead of the flash of an illusion, their last moment together blinks away with the closing of a door. For Jack and Rose we know the ship sinks even before the start of the film, but the moment Rose starts telling their story we see Jack’s drawings at the bottom of the ocean, and instead of the final image of their love, we get the look of loss in her eyes, just as telling of how it will end.
Marriage is equated with death here, and it is a death in a way, at least for Héloïse’s spirit. We see her come back into herself as Vivaldi’s Summer plays in the orchestra hall, smiling as she is hit by all the memories, causing her to tear up, and it is like she is reliving her life, flashing back but we only see her sitting there and not what runs through her mind. Jack comes back too, in a dream of Rose’s, young and smiling again on a ship that is whole once more. Both final scenes serve the same purpose, to show the smile, the light in the eyes, of the lover punished most cruelly by fate that will not allow them to be together. Jack is alive once more, and Héloïse can relive memory without judgement or perception, and for a moment all is well. All is well, and we believe that Rose and Jack may be together in the afterlife now, or that there is some chance that Héloïse will meet Marianne’s gaze and they will reunite after Orpheus (Marianne) has turned around to let Eurydice (Héloïse) fall back into the underworld, but neither question is answered, as it is up to us to choose between poetic separation, and the lucky twist of love being allowed to survive.
As the ship sinks, the band plays on, and as Héloïse cries and smiles and learns to breathe again in that crowded theater, so does the orchestra. At one moment, the band plays a section of the Orpheus symphony, knowing they are about to be met with the same watery underworld as Eurydice. Orpheus and Eurydice are a primary motif within ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’, representing the choice Héloïse and Marianne make to look back and remember their time together instead of trying to drag their love through it, the poet’s choice as they call it. For those on the Titanic, Orpheus instead acts as a beacon of hope, a phantom idea that a powerful figure will reach down to them as they die, and pull them back up without looking back. Sadly, this doesn’t manifest in life, the easiest gesture of being plucked from the water into a lifeboat only coming for a lucky few. The violinists playing Orpheus is a gesture of comfort to the dying, like Marianne’s book of myths or the Vivaldi piece played on the harpsichord is to Héloïse.
To reconstitute a romance with iconography that’s become the cultural canon is tricky, especially to do so in a film so wholly radical yet personal. Few shots match to perfect parallels due to difference in setting, and dialogue isn’t lifted, so the referencing takes place within the dynamic of the characters primarily. ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ avoids feeling like a direct rehash of ‘Titanic’ by imbuing its gestures with personal meaning. Sciamma’s realisation of her already densely layered script pulls these gestures from truth, lifting a conversation about body language from one love story in her life, and a head on a shoulder unsteadily testing the waters of love from another.
Headlines like “Céline Sciamma Admits To Borrowing The Structure Of Cannes Hit ‘Portrait Of A Lady On Fire’ From James Cameron’s ‘Titanic’” don’t quite tell the full story. ‘Titanic’ is a typical romance structure, the standout aspects come in its intensity through circumstance and character. They meet, societal obstacles make it hard to be together, it takes a while for the romance to be expressed physically, and the romance meets an end that leaves an impression on the lover left free by it, this structural brevity going as far back as ‘Brief Encounter’. Instead of copying, Sciamma pays homage to these impactful and well known sequences, her versions of a lover’s hand on a chest above the sea, or a woman lying in bed nude to have her image immortalized become a new kind of intimacy for her characters, one built upon the same equality, bringing her own experience to show not only how an iconic film has shaped her, but how she can use the love stories in her own life to show that same love story twenty-five years later. She says “A successful love story should not be about eternal possession. No, it should be about emancipation”, and while Rose’s emancipation from the stifling world of wealth is clearer, Héloïse is freed by at least being allowed to know herself before she and Marianne part, which is the real end of their love story. ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ supposes that the love story can end before the film is over, and that its impact is an epilogue to reflect on, instead of a continuation. – Sarah Williams
‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ is streaming on Hulu. ‘Titanic’ is available on home video.