Portrait of a Lady on Fire
The Mutual Cinematic Education of José and Camilo #33 (<PERSON>’s Choice)
“He chooses the memory of her. That's why he turns.”
The safe haven created by love that’s inevitably bound to be intruded upon by the outside world, by the oppressive systems in place that feel intent on sniffing out what little joy we get to feel. It’s in the face of such an insurmountable tragedy that we only have two choices: either we become one more sad story, or we relish in that devastation and do those larger than life feelings justice.
Had <PERSON> not turned around, his love and <PERSON>’s would have stayed between them. In calling out for him, <PERSON> made sure their love would survive them.
How ironic, then, that <PERSON> seals her own immortality by refusing, albeit unknowingly, to turn around to face <PERSON>. 295
She knows she’s already doomed to the Underworld, there is no saving their love story. So there she is, reliving those moments by way of the music <PERSON> showed her, the only way to make it through her death in life. She knows this too will pass, but that her portraits will live forever.
“He doesn't make the lover's choice, but the poet's.”
One must imagine <PERSON> happy.
<PERSON>’s thoughts:
Portrait takes all the elements of a masterful period piece to tell an unabashedly political, radical, engagée love story between an emancipated artist and her aristocratic, tomboyish subject. The robes, the color palettes, the Woolfian seaside scenes, are all at the service of the intense seduction between <PERSON> and <PERSON>. Distancing itself from XVIII century ideas of love, passion and intimacy (voire, Les Liasons Dangereuses or the works of the Marquis de Sade), and almost preceding in time the great works that invented intimacy (<PERSON>, <PERSON>) in the XIXth, Portrait creates a state of exception, un état d’exception where the acts of love and art (the regard) are re examined by these powerful, subversive women.
<PERSON> the poet, formerly a lover, makes a choice for us all, as at the end our heart breaks as her lover, this universally elegant creature, this déése, never faces her again as she lets herself be engulfed by the flames of <PERSON>’s Summer Tempest, in yet another perfect metaphorical representation of a young woman being consumed by fire. 464