Great cinema, like all great art, invites conversation as much as it invites viewing.

The Long Take and Luz Films have partnered for a collaborative post, where we share two perspectives on the 2019 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady on Fire from director Céline Sciamma.

We hope you not only enjoy it, but also leave with a deeper way of looking.

I. Raphaël

I have been trying to name why Portrait of a Lady on Fire lingers the way it does. It’s not only the romance or the ending. It’s the way the film looks at its own moments.

At times the film feels completely inside the present, as if looking hard enough might slow down the time, and at the same moment, it already seems to be looking back, aware that what I’m watching is finite, already turning into memory. There is a tension between two ways of seeing and I think the soul of the film lives there.

There are moments where the attention feels physical. The camera lingers on a face, a gesture, the space between two people and looking begins to feel like a form of touch. These scenes simply stay, the shared presence is enough to hold the moment in place.

This feels close to how lovers look at each other — not analyzing, just being there — yet, the stillness carries an awareness that no intensity can stop time from moving forward.

Gradually, another kind of looking slips in. It is not colder or less emotional but it carries a different awareness. The attention becomes more deliberate, more shaped. Looking starts to feel like something that knows it will have to remember.

The film grows conscious of form, of framing and repetition. Marianne and Héloïse try to live as if the edges of time spent together were not there.

Painting sits at the center of this shift. To paint someone is to look with care but also with distance. It’s intimacy that admits its own limits. Like a way of holding someone close while already translating them into something that will survive their absence.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire does not treat this as a betrayal of feeling and if anything, it suggests that truly seeing someone also means understanding you cannot keep them.

What gives Portrait of a Lady on Fire its emotional weight is that these two ways of looking rarely separate. Its most powerful moments hold both at once. A glance can feel immediate and already remembered. A shared silence can feel alive and archival at the same time. The moments are being lived and mourned in the same breath.

The pain comes from loving something while already feeling the shape of its ending pressing against the present.

As the film reaches its final scenes, presence shifts into another form. What remains is a different kind of attention. It’s an attention that carries love forward in its own way. Memory is treated as responsibility, a continuation of presence in another shape.

I think the film invites us to hold both ways of seeing at once. It lets us feel what it’s like to live inside both — to want the moment to stretch and to sense, at the same time, the contour of its ending. That double awareness gives the film its stillness, its restraint and its afterglow.

This may not fully explain Portrait of a Lady on Fire and it does not need to. Thinking about these two visions, the lover that wants to stay, and the poet that already knows it will have to remember has changed how I experience the film. I’m curious how it resonates with your experience or what other ways of looking it opens for you.

“He chooses the memory of her. That’s why he turns. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice. But the poet’s.”

II. Taylor

I love your observation of why the film lingers is because of the way in which it looks. For me this film exists entirely as a conversation on the act of looking.

Of course there is the obvious story thread of a painter having to look at her subject in order to paint her, but then there are the more subtle ways in which the conversation deepens as the two women begin to truly see one another.

Their relationship starts out as a broader conversation of women as subject, as object, even as reluctant muse. Marianne, in order to paint her properly, is observing every aspect of Héloïse physically - her ears, her eyes, her hands and as she observes so does the audience. But as the trust builds between the two, the physical admiration turns into something internal: from looking to seeing to knowing. And to be known by another, to be truly seen, is the foundational attribute of love.

One of my favorite moments is when Marianne attempts to paint her for the first time and tries to recall all of the times she’s spent looking. She closes her eyes and in that moment exists a foretelling of looking as a form of memory-making. As if the absence could already be felt. It’s the first sign of struggle between the lover’s glance and the poet’s.

Later on, as Marianne begins to see visions of Héloïse dressed in white - a foreshadowing of her inevitable marriage - the memory then shifts into something somber as Héloïse’s memory already begins to haunt Marianne.

As you’ve also pointed out, another thing that struck me upon rewatch was how “present” the film feels. To me it seems to embody that overused sentiment of a love that makes “time stand still.”

The phrase itself might be a cliché, but being able to create the feeling of actual time standing still is another skill entirely and Sciamma proves herself a true cinematic craftsman here.

“She said it makes time longer.”

Héloïse tells Marianne before they apply to one another a mixture to make them “fly.” And herein lies the desire of not only the two lovers, but of Sciamma herself. To stretch out each scene before us as an infinite thread woven together by every intentional act of looking which temporarily grounds us, the audience and they, the lovers, in a symphony of presence.

I believe that is a large part of what makes the movie so visceral and intoxicating; not just because of the cinematography that offers the richness of a Renaissance painting or the consistent crackling of fire reminding us of its attributes of warmth and destruction or the orchestral songs that lift us higher, but the way in which the film never seems to ask of us anything but to be present with these women as the women seek to be present with each other.

Even though the film naturally reaches its impending “doom,” as did Orpheus and Eurydice, the scenes themselves never act as a ticking clock or the feeling of timing running out except of course right before it does. But the moments outside of the last 24 hours they spend together feel every bit of the notion of “timeless.” As if they exist in some alternative reality where time truly isn’t a construct and in that way their relationship enters the realm of the eternal.

“In solitude, I felt the liberty you spoke of. But I also felt your absence”

The film ends on an orchestral swell as Marianne is forced back into the role of simply onlooker. Observing Héloïse’s life, or at least a moment of it, from an even greater distance than when they first met. As Eurydice was returned to the underworld by her lover’s glance and Orpheus is left with only her memory, the two women return to a world in which they may be looked at, but never truly seen.

This was a joy to write together. We’re grateful you spent time with both of our perspectives.