Portrait de la jeune fille en feu

he very title of seeks to pin down the unpinnable: to fix a flame in place. Céline Sciamma’s 18thcentury romance centres on the innate slipperiness of condensing someone’s presence into oil on canvas, a process in which the act of rendering becomes an intimate exchange between an artist’s interpretation and her subject’s knowability—and one which, in the case of Sciamma’s painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), and her subject, Héloise (Adele Haenel), the daughter of a countess, sparks a growing affection. By telling her tale through Marianne’s flashback, Sciamma gives an otherwise conventional narrative device a pointed thematic charge: Marianne is not simply remembering events but trying to concretize them in her mind’s (painterly) eye, to fix the fleeting and ineffable currents of desire, the flow of gazes and gestures, as vividly composed