Love is equal.
In 18th-century France, there was widespread inequality between men and women.
This means that the pursuit of free and equal true love between men and women is difficult and complicated.
And love between the same sex is still simple and pure.
In the era of the rise of LGBT movies, the world has heard too many critical voices, and the struggle for equal rights is in full swing.
Some works hope to awaken the conscience of the world by showing social injustice, so that more people can stand on the side of "aliens".
Just excessive criticism can easily lead people into a situation of fighting for the sake of resistance.
The world needs beauty, not a never-ending struggle.
Serenity Sienma realized this, and her self-written portrait of a Burning Woman shows more about love itself.
01
It's a memory of a love story.
The main plot is told in the form of flashbacks.
The female painter Marianne, in the process of teaching students, evoked her memories because of the "Portrait of the Burning Woman".
It was a process of falling in love.
Brittany, France, 1760. Marianne meets the rich lady Héloïse.
Because of the working relationship, Marianne needs to observe and understand Héloïse, and unconsciously, the relationship between the two becomes more and more intimate, and the forbidden fire is rubbed.
In the "unequal" environment, they get "equal" love.
In 15 minutes, through two events, director Selyn Seyima sketched the social contours of gender inequality.
The first was Marianne's boat ride, her painting tools falling into the water. The director specifically gave a shot of the men on the ship to show their indifference and unwillingness to "bend" to help a woman.
Then there was the marriage of Héloïse, who had no choice. Even if she explicitly refuses to marry a strange man she has never met, her mother will force her to cooperate with the marriage.
The man could get her portrait and decide whether to marry or not.
However, the woman did not obtain the man's portrait, and then decided whether to marry or not, and could only passively cooperate and wait.
In the first half of the film, the camera is mostly moving.
This can imply that in addition to the "inequality" of the environment, it can also imply that the relationship between Marianne and Héloïse has not yet stabilized.
At the same time, the long, unstable shots "connected" them like ropes.
With the advent of more fixed lenses, marianne and Héloïse's relationship began to become equal and stable.
The premise of equality in love is that two people are mutual and interactive.
At first, Marianne and Héloïse were painters and models.
Marianne's work was a portrait of Héloïse, who needed to approach and observe Héloïse.
One is active and one is passive.
Since Héloïse did not know the truth, she did not form an effective interaction with Marianne.
Marianne could only rely on her own painting skills, memorizing every part of Héloïse and finally piecing them together into a portrait.
She can accomplish her own tasks, but Héloïse does not agree that the person in the painting is the real self.
It's like a person trying to get close to his "target person", but the target person ignores it, and the result can only be reluctant. Just in response to that classic line that is not boring:
"Even if you get my people, you can't get my heart."
No matter how rich the Milanese man who wanted to marry Héloïse, Héloïse did not interact with him, and the two sides would not have real love.
Active and passive are unequal relationships.
Only when the model is willing to cooperate can the painter read its soul.
Love is not only the joy of the flesh, but also the resonance of the soul.
When Héloïse was willing to respond to Marianne, she went from being a passive model to an active observer.
The relationship is equal only when both parties are active.
Their relationship rose from working partners to the stage of friendship.
Pay attention to the camera angle given by the director.
The first half has Marianne's view of Héloïse, but not Héloïse's side.
It is only in the second half that Héloïse's perspective towards Marianne appears.
This shows that Héloïse is turning passive into active, observing Marianne's every move, just as Marianne observes herself.
The relationship between the two sides is finally as stable and reciprocal as the feeling given by the camera.
02
Perhaps worried that having only two characters would make the film too monotonous, among the two heroines, Serene Sienma also joined the role of the maid Sophie.
Sophie's pregnancy strengthens the link between Marianne and Héloïse, incidentally indicting the difficult situation of women in the old days.
Whether nobles or servants, women have no freedom of their own.
One of the innovative and excellent things about Portrait of a Burning Woman is that the viewer can see beyond the lens.
The men in the film are nothing more than "decorations", but the oppression of male power is everywhere.
Through Sophie's description, the tragic situation of Héloïse's sister can be learned. As you can imagine, Héloïse's sister chose to resist, preferring to be crushed by jade rather than for Waquan.
At the end, Marianne attends the exhibition, using her father's name. Before the correspondence, Marianne said that she did not have the right to paint male nude paintings, which shows that female painters are difficult to be recognized by society.
In one final powerful long shot, Marianne's subjective perspective gazes at Héloïse.
At this time, Héloïse was living a life contrary to her wishes, and the complex expression expressed her inner painful struggle. Paired with almost the only real soundtrack in the film, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, the emotional power of the play gushes out of the screen.
Originally, the director did not want to use any soundtrack, because making a love movie without a soundtrack is challenging. But in order to make the emotions more in place, she gave up the original idea.
The so-called rarity is precious, and in the quiet atmosphere of watching the movie, the sudden appearance of the soundtrack is more infectious.
There is no need to hit Marianne back, and the audience can also appreciate how broken her mood is at the moment.
Marianne is a force against male power.
She hopes to become a painter and break the domination of men in the field of art.
She is rebellious at heart, so she hopes that Héloïse can rebel and pursue her love freedom.
The painting of Héloïse's burning skirt was named "Portrait of a Burning Woman," meaning that it was hoped that women who were forced to marry would be able to break free from the shackles of etiquette.
Portraits represent unfree marriages, oppression of women. She always wanted to destroy the portrait, so she lit the fire of hope and burned the "portrait of the woman".
It's just that in that era, there was very little that women could do.
The era of tragedy is doomed to a tragic end.
Selene Theamma cleverly quotes a Greek mythological story that reveals the emotional fate of Marianne and Héloïse and offers a whole new interpretation of the mythological story.
A man named Orpheus, his wife Ochadik, was bitten to death by a poisonous snake. In order to revive his wife, he went to the mansion at all costs, touched the king and queen of Hades with his song, and got the opportunity to resurrect his wife.
It was just that he had to promise a seemingly simple condition: he must not look back even once before he led his wife out of the mansion, or his wife would never be able to return to the human world and die again.
Worried that his wife would not keep up, he could not help but turn back, and finally separated from his wife forever.
Sophie's idea represents the confusion of most people, why go back? God's will is so clear!
Héloïse's idea is a relatively reasonable explanation, perhaps Olytes asked Orpheus to turn back, out of strong emotional bondage, Orpheus could not help but be human.
Marianne's idea was bold.
Orpheus was an artist who made a "poet's choice" to keep Euledique in his memory forever.
But it was a cruel line of thought, because it meant that he was willing to sacrifice Eurydice in exchange for a more eternal memory.
Marianne is also an artist who will also know how to turn her lover into a memory.
After experiencing a parting similar to orpheus and Euphric, she truly experienced Orpheus's pain and grew.
Others do not know, seemingly simple goodbye, in fact, hidden endless pain and thoughts.
03
Portrait of a Burning Woman won two trophies at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival for Best Screenplay and the Gay Palme d'Or, with a Douban score of 8.6, IMDb 8.2, and Metascore score of 95.
It is such a superb work, but it is missing in the Oscar for best international film.
The reason is not that the Oscars are blind, but that France chose "Les Misérables" to run. According to the rules of the Oscars, each country can only choose one film.
The Golden Globes did not have this restriction, and "Portrait of a Burning Woman" easily joined "Les Misérables" to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.
Even the Oscars are not eligible to run, and they have been robbed of the limelight by "Parasite", and many people feel sorry for "Portrait of a Burning Woman".
The famous French magazine "Film Handbook" did not give any face, bluntly saying that Serene Sienma made a "flashy academic TV movie".
It is true that Serene Sienma does not take much care of the patience of the audience, and the audience of the film is far inferior to that of "Parasite".
Portrait of a Burning Woman is so artistic that the film is less like a "movie" and more like a dynamic oil painting with a lens.
I really didn't expect that the film could also be used to paint oil paintings.
The French side may have paid more attention to the viewing of the film last year, so it chose "Les Misérables" with a stronger sense of tension.
The value of Portrait of a Burning Woman will never be diminished by missing an Oscar.
As the director put it:
"The film explores in depth the importance of art in our lives because it comforts us, and it also tells us how love can lead us to love art."
The love of Marianne and Héloïse is a burning flame that illuminates the path of women's liberation.
This love will continue to spread into the future and will never be extinguished.