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Join us on August 29 for a special Reel Talk with Tom Knoblauch!
Tom Knoblauch, Ph.D. is an author, internationally award-winning filmmaker, broadcaster, and film history lecturer. He writes cultural criticism at his Substack and is a co-host of the comedy podcast The Y2K Show. His 2025 book, Building a Feminocentric Canon: Céline Sciamma and the Dawn of Post-Auteurism analyzes Sciamma’s entire filmography as a model for a new vision of authorship and canonicity.
Passion brews quietly between an artist and her subject, until together they create a space in which it can briefly flourish, in this sumptuous eighteenth-century romance from Céline Sciamma, one of contemporary French cinema’s most acclaimed auteurs. Charged with a yearning that almost transcends time and space, Portrait of a Lady on Fire mines the emotional and artistic possibilities that emerge when women can freely live together and see one another in a world without men.
Summoned to an isolated seaside estate on a secret assignment, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) must find a way to paint a wedding portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who is resisting chattel marriage, by furtively observing her. What unfolds in exquisite tension is an exchange of sustained gazes in which the two women come to know each other’s gestures, expressions, and bodies with rapturous intimacy, ultimately forging a subversive creative collaboration as well as a delirious romance.
Reviews
"One of the most unforgettable depictions of love foresworn, of lesbian love, of any true love, in cinema." – Criterion
As part of our See Change initiative, we strive to showcase the work of women and non-binary individuals and their behind-the-scenes involvement in a production.
This film is written and directed by Céline Sciamma, produced by Bénédicte Couvreur, and features cinematography by Claire Mathon.
All showtimes are at the Ruth Sokolof – Mary theater unless otherwise noted.
