Abstract

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), or the Music of Queer Love
Noah Jay, Goldmsiths, University of London

Well-renowned for its queering of the gaze, it might come as a surprise that Céline Sciamma's 2019 period piece Portrait of a Lady on Fire ends with a striking musical moment. The Presto finale to Antonio Vivaldi's “Summer” Violin Concerto enters acousmatically while Marianne spies her former lover – Héloïse – across a crowded auditorium. Years previous, they had fallen in love as Marianne painted Héloïse's betrothal portrait on a secluded island off the coast of Brittany. The women had been separated by the patriarchal powers of 18th-century European society, and in this auditorium we witness the first and only time Marianne sees her once-lover after their romance. In this essay, I perform an extended analysis of the film's final five minutes, situating the music in the film's treatment of sound, as well its major themes, eventually teasing out a glimmer of optimism in what might seem to be a sombre conclusion. My argument hinges on an ambiguity afforded by “Summer’s” acousmatic nature. Neither unequivocally diegetic nor non-diegetic, the cue inspires a reading which resonates with much of the growing scholarship on Portrait and draws new connections between aspects of this enormously rich film.

Introduction

It might come as a surprise that Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019) closes with a striking sonic moment, given that its director branded the film a “manifesto about the female gaze.”1 Entering suddenly, the Presto finale to Vivaldi’s “Summer” Violin Concerto accompanies an unusually long point-of-view shot from the perspective of the film’s protagonist, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), as she watches her one-time lover, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), from across a crowded auditorium. Having originally been tasked with painting Héloïse’s portrait in secret, the two women fell in love, enjoying a vanishingly short period together before being forcibly separated by Héloïse’s impending marriage to a Milanese aristocrat. This is only the third instance of music heard in the film. Earlier, Marianne falteringly played the opening to “Summer” on the harpsichord for Héloïse – the moment when their mutual attraction first surfaced. We are reminded of this during the film’s final moments, as Marianne might be when encountering her former lover. Pushing in slowly, Héloïse’s initial long shot becomes an intimate close-up and, as the strings charge forward, we watch her fixated on something offscreen. Héloïse begins to breathe more deeply, impassioned. In the film’s final moments – and with her gaze still unbroken – a smile crosses Héloïse’s face and a tear falls down her cheek.

At first, we might consider that the object of Héloïse’s gaze may be the ensemble performing “Summer.” But as this lingering shot continues, we begin to question whether the music can in fact be heard by the film’s characters. As we are not shown the music’s source, it is unclear whether the music is diegetic – that is, for Marianne and Héloïse to hear. Alternatively, the music may be non-diegetic, audible only to the audience. Or “Summer” could be neither diegetic nor non-diegetic, its narratological position irreducible to a singular fixed position. This musical cue incites numerous questions: why is such an illegible response provoked in Héloïse? Why, in a film with such a sparse soundtrack, is music given such importance at its conclusion? And why is this sequence so devastating? Perhaps these questions are meant to be left unanswered.

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Despite being comprised of a mere two shots with the introduction of a musical cue, the final minutes of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu in its original French) are enormously powerful. To understand these shots, it is necessary to explore the entire film. In this essay, then, I read Portrait’s final moments through the lens of the film’s major themes. I locate here a glimmer of queer optimism amongst the pain shared by the two women, presumably cognisant of the fact that their relationship can only exist in memory. 

Even though I will be espousing the importance of sound in this film, the gaze is undoubtedly a central theme. Sciamma’s labelling of her film as a “manifesto about the female gaze” enters it into a discourse ignited by Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”2 For Mulvey, the camera’s gaze engenders a specific set of power relations which are mapped onto representations of gender difference: the spectator identifies with the male protagonist who has agency over his life while the (typically female) spectated is reduced to a passive image. Of course, for a film about sapphic lovers an obvious question arises: how does a female spectator’s gaze interact with the female cinematic image? Mulvey argues that the female spectator is forced into a state of either identification with the camera’s male gaze or a masochistic identification with the onscreen woman’s fetishised image.3 Her delineation is problematised by the presence of sapphic women who possess a different relationship to the scopophilic gaze. This can be seen quite clearly in Portrait, in which a sapphic woman seizes the male painterly gaze. The power of her subject’s returned gaze enters the women into a relationship in which they “begin to comprehend how to see themselves and each other.”4

But, as I will explore in this essay, the women learn to relate to each other in sonic ways as well. This opens the film up to a queer critique of its soundtrack. Still a relatively nascent subfield, queer theory is seldom applied in film music and sound discourse, with only a handful of texts published on the subject so far. It is widely agreed that queerness is not located in any specific sound or musical style but, as Juan Suarez puts it, relies on “placement, context, and use; on the way sound is articulated with other components of the image [;] and … with the screening situation itself.”5 Morgan Woolsey concurs, writing that “the relation between soundtrack and image track is often the site of surprising and sometimes critique-enabling incongruity,” which can be weaponised to queer effect.6 My analysis below therefore places the soundtrack in conversation with Portrait’s image track, and this is critical for a film which openly thematises the visual. Moreover, a number of scholars – including Suarez and Woolsey – agree that audiovisual asynchrony can become a site of queer expression.7 The ambiguity engendered by “Summer” might be placed alongside such arguments. Lucretia Knapp, for example, writes that in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) “many incongruencies between the film’s visuals and its soundtrack … create space for Marnie [the protagonist] outside the dualistic economies of patriarchy.”8 Audiovisual ambiguity, I will argue, works in a comparable way to audiovisual asynchrony inasmuch as ambiguous sound is “made to work against the way [filmic] components function in conventional narrative cinema.”9

Ambiguity is a recurring motif within film music scholarship, especially with respect to the diegesis. Referring to the “narratively implied spatiotemporal world of the actions and the characters,” the distinction between the diegetic and non-diegetic realms has been troubled since its introduction to film music studies by Claudia Gorbman in 1987.10 A wealth of other narratological positions have been proposed over the years. In this essay, however, I avoid embroiling my analysis in such theoretical debates, instead choosing simply to accept the indeterminate positioning of the music within the diegetic/non-diegetic space. As Robynn Stilwell has argued, a troubling of the diegetic/non-diegetic boundary does not necessarily render the formulation useless.11 Indeed, many scholars have based their analyses on moments of narratological ambiguity. A notable recent contribution to the discourse can be found in Heidi Hart and Beate Schirrmacher’s article exploring such musical indeterminacy in Henrik Erlingsson’s A Woman at War (2018).12 The authors intone that ambiguity “not only questions the stability of a specific phenomenon but also draws attention to the constructedness of a binary order itself.” They expand upon this: “perceptual ambiguities … have the potential to destabilize a whole set of conceptual binaries as well.”13

Destabilisation of conceptual binaries is one of the primary goals of queer theory. This is exactly what queer theorists like Sara Ahmed, Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler do in their writing about sexuality and gender.14 These thinkers identify and deconstruct widely held assumptions surrounding sexuality and gender in an effort to destabilise the belief that society is organised naturally and not constructed by self-interested hegemonic systems.15 While each queer theorist has their own approach, I foreground Sara Ahmed’s ideas in her 2006 book Queer Phenomenology.16 Ahmed weaponises an extended analysis of the notion of ‘sexual orientation’ to dissect the marginalisation of non-conforming people in society. Her writing proves especially germane when considered alongside the Portrait’s central act of turning, a theme I explore in depth below. Sexuality becomes the performative action of turning towards some people and away from others.17 But the others whom we turn towards and away from (our sexual orientation) affects more than our sexual or romantic partners. “Different orientations, different ways of directing one’s desires,” Ahmed maintains, “means inhabiting different worlds.”18 Portrait evidences this claim: Marianne and Héloïse experience a different world on the island, one away from prohibiting patriarchal powers and in which all inhabitants (all of whom are women) are equal. 

This essay takes the form of an extended analysis of the film’s final moments. With only two simple shots and the introduction of a musical cue, Sciamma manages to create a sequence which has enormous interpretive depth. To move towards understanding the film’s concluding five minutes, I believe it is necessary to explore the entire film, its approach to sound, image, and its central themes. As I hope to demonstrate, Portrait is much more than a “manifesto about the female gaze,” just like “Summer’s” ambiguity has much more to offer than an example of music which falls outside the diegetic/non-diegetic binary. As such, I will work towards a deeper understanding of the scene in the auditorium by starting at the beginning of the film, introducing its approach to sound in both the filmmaking and for the characters too. I then move to explore from a sonic standpoint that I and other scholars view as a central theme: the act of turning. Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology proves useful in bridging film music scholarship with the queer lens I apply to Portrait’s engagement with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. From here, a glimmer of optimism can be heard in “Summer’s” echo at the end of this complex film. 

1: Sounding Portrait and the Diegesis

Set on an island off the coast of France in the 18th-century, Portrait follows Marianne, a painter, who is tasked with painting the portrait of the elusive and aristocratic Héloïse. To disrupt her impending marriage, Héloïse refuses to sit for a portraitist, so Marianne, employed by Héloïse’s mother, the Countess (Valeria Golino), poses as a walking companion for the obstructive bride-to-be and paints the portrait in secret. The painter studies her subject through stolen glances, but as the completion of the portrait draws closer, Marianne and Héloïse start to feel a romance growing between them. They bond over a shared love for music, with Héloïse asking Marianne to describe to her the sound of an orchestra. This Marianne is unable to articulate in words and instead sits at a harpsichord, tentatively playing the opening few bars of the Presto finale from Antonio Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto, commonly known as “Summer.” As the women sit side-by-side on a stool before the keyboard, their shared glances take on an intimacy which only grows stronger from this point in the film. Narrating an imagined programme alongside the opening chords, Marianne attempts to represent the expansive sound of an orchestra on the keyboard. Although she quickly falters – forgetting the notes – it is not Marianne’s fumbling of the music which draws Héloïse back into a state of despondency. Héloïse’s smile only fades when the painter attempts to console her by promising the beauty of music in Milan, the city the bride is to live.

Soon, the portrait is finished, and Marianne reveals the portrait to Héloïse. But Héloïse is unimpressed with the painting, asking Marianne, “is that how you see me?” Continuing acerbically: “the fact it isn’t close to me, that I can understand. But I find it sad it isn’t close to you (00:49:24).19 In a fit of rage, Marianne impulsively destroys the face of the portrait. Even though the Countess is displeased, Héloïse persuades her to allow Marianne to stay on the island to redo the portrait while the Countess takes a five-day trip away. Héloïse’s mother is only convinced by the fact that, for the first time, her daughter agrees to sit for a portraitist. With a newfound freedom, the women’s portrait-painting days blend into the nights, which they spend chatting with Sophie, the maid-turned-friend (Luàna Bajrami). One night, Héloïse reads aloud from a French translation of Ovid’s well-known myth Orpheus and Eurydice (01:11:13). In the myth, devastated by his newlywed Eurydice’s untimely death, Orpheus travels into the underworld to bargain with Hades for her resurrection. He succeeds in persuading Hades to grant Eurydice a new life on one condition: Orpheus must not look back at his love as he leads her out of the underworld. Just before reaching the threshold, however, Orpheus loses faith that Eurydice is behind him; he turns and causes her to die a second time. In Portrait, Sophie is dumbfounded by Orpheus’ choice to turn, an act which she regards as selfish as it is self-destructive. Marianne proposes a motivation, suggesting that Orpheus “chooses the memory of [Eurydice]. That’s why he turns. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice but the poet’s.”01:14:12 In response, Héloïse ponders for a moment, reads to the end of the passage and then says, as if thinking aloud, “Perhaps [Eurydice] was the one who said, ‘turn around.’”

Following this conversation (although at an unspecified time later), the trio congregate at a fireside ceremony with a collection of other women (01:14:40). Seemingly spontaneously, the congregants break into song, first humming, then slowly sliding into a bright major chord. They sing a cappella, a rhythmic chant more reminiscent of 20th-century minimalism than any contemporaneous musical styles.20 As the other women sing, Marianne and Héloïse gaze at each other across the bonfire. The flames, for Benjamin Eldon Stevens, capture the double bind of desirous looking: fire “both makes sight possible … and threatens to consume,” just as the gaze is a means of relating to others but simultaneously enters them into a patriarchal power dynamic.21 Suddenly, the bottom of Héloïse’s dress catches fire. Although Héloïse’s expression barely changes, Marianne runs over, grabs her by the hand, and suddenly the film jump-cuts to a beach. The two women run to a secluded cave with the sounds of the women’s voices still echoing in the soundtrack. The non-diegetic voices stop abruptly along with the diegetic sounds of the sea, and only the women’s gasping breaths are present in the soundtrack. Two thirds of the way through the film, Marianne and Héloïse finally kiss.

Yet, as was pre-ordained, the second portrait is finished, Héloïse’s mother returns, and Marianne must leave the island forever. The couple’s final moments are emotional: the Countess arrives with a long flowing wedding dress for her daughter. Héloïse tries it on as Marianne is preparing to leave and, just as the painter reaches the door, Héloïse runs after her, calling “turn around” (01:51:30). The image Marianne turns to see is one which she had premonished twice earlier in the film: Héloïse’s bright white dress stands out from the dark staircase, and as the door closes, she fades into the dark, lost to the underworld. The film ends with two epilogues which Marianne narrates in voiceover. In the first, Marianne exhibits her own portrait of Orpheus and Eurydice in a crowded gallery, depicting that fateful moment of turning. A man attending the exhibition notes how Eurydice is depicted as if she is saying goodbye to Orpheus. Marianne then spies a portrait of Héloïse, depicted with a young child and holding a book thumbed open to page 28. This is the page of the translation book on which Marianne produced a self-portrait for Héloïse as a memento. The second epilogue is the scene in the auditorium which ends the film: Marianne sees Héloïse across the room staring intently offscreen to her right. We are told that this is the last time Marianne saw Héloïse, and that Héloïse never returned the gaze. This final shot, lasting almost two minutes, is accompanied by Vivaldi’s “Summer” performed by an orchestra, and leaves many questions unanswered.

From this summary, I hope to have demonstrated the importance of sound in Portrait. Much more than a meditation on the female gaze, Portrait explores the multiple and varied ways that these women can relate to each other in an unsympathetic, uncomprehending society. The film’s soundtrack is strikingly sparse, punctuated by only three moments of music – the harpsichord scene, the bonfire scene, and the final scene in the auditorium. Nevertheless, there is much to be said about the film’s sound design and what little music is included. For example, Albertine Fox writes that “through its soundtrack, [the film] loosens the stiffness of ways of seeing, understood only in terms of looking, not listening.”22 Fox notes the presence of ambiguity in the sound design, writing that “the soft crackling of fire seeps into the mise-en-scène … [replacing] the familiar association between the smouldering fireplace and Hollywoodian heterosexual romance, with an excessive and disruptive crackling that lingers queerly in the background.”23 The effect of this sound design, Fox contends, is to render “sonic proximities … that trace intensities and affinities between the female characters.”24 This can also be seen in the diminishing of environmental sound effects (birds chirping, waves crashing, footsteps on the sand). This consequently aurally foregrounds the women’s panting just before their first kiss, the almost tactile breath sounds sonifying the passion which the lovers can now fully express. The queer effects of the film’s sound design can be similarly located in the closing moments of the film.

Due to music’s infrequent appearance in Portrait’s soundtrack, it takes on especial significance when heard. Each of the three musical appearances mark important turns in the central relationship.25 The harpsichord scene fuels Marianne and Héloïse’s mutual attraction; the scene at the bonfire ceremony precipitates their union; and the final scene in the auditorium signals the end of the relationship in physical terms. Music becomes a medium through which the two women can relate to each other, just as they do through portraiture and a shared interest in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Madeleine Pelling writes that they communicate in art’s “peripheral spaces” like book margins, miniature portraits, and a “queer encoded canvas.”26 For Pelling, the emphasis on communication in peripheral and liminal spaces reclaims the queer people’s historical marginalisation by imagining the ways in which queer people might skirt around prohibiting powers.27 

Sound, and especially music, can be counted among these peripheral channels for a number of reasons. Music is often associated with emotional expression and this capacity has often been harnessed by queer people. Queer musicologist Philip Brett has written that music “is particularly accommodating to those who have difficulty in expressing feelings in day-to-day life, because the emotion is unspecified and unattached.”28 Before their kiss, Marianne and Héloïse cannot speak of their attraction for fear that it is not reciprocated. Their shared passion for music establishes a bond outside the denotative certainty of language. This facet of music is explored by Scott Paulin in his analysis of music in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948).29 Expanding on D.A. Miller’s provocative semiotic analysis of the same film, Paulin argues that music signifies in a manner wholly different to language or image, grounded, rather, “in the bodies and fantasies of its auditors both on-screen and in the theater.”30 In this way, music “constructs desire and opens up a space in which fantasies can be projected.”31 In Portrait’s case, “Summer” becomes a space wherein both Marianne and Héloïse can project their mutual attraction, demonstrated by both the growing intimacy during the harpsichord scene and by the piece’s recurrence at the end of the film. Fox concurs, writing that the music allows the women to “communicate feelings through doing, not telling.”32 Without confirming it in explicit terms, Marianne’s performance at the harpsichord is – in a way – a performance of her unspoken desire, which is, for the first time, externalised and projected into the space between the nearly-lovers. 

A reading which locates music in the space between the two women can be extended to the final scene through consideration of its narratological positioning. When “Summer” starts, our initial assumption is that the music is diegetic, that the women are attending a performance of the concerto. It might be inferred, then, that the women are both drawn to this performance in order to reexperience the moment they shared at the harpsichord on the island. Héloïse’s passionate reaction is understandable here: the music might represent to her a lost joy that she was privileged to have experienced. Where a portrait is considered permanent, music is often felt as transient: resonant with Marianne’s words about her first, failed portrait, music is commonly thought of as comprised of “fleeting moments which may lack truth” (00:50:13). But Héloïse retorts, “not everything is fleeting. Some feelings are deep.” Correspondingly, “Summer’s” meaning persists for Héloïse. It reignites in her a feeling which was first awakened at the harpsichord – a love which presumably never abated. As long as she can access music, she can always relive her affair with Marianne. If the portrait represents the inevitable curtailment of their relationship – what Jackie Stacey names “a love that has already been lost” – then “Summer” encompasses a more complete picture of the two women’s time together.33 Music, like their affair, is impermanent but intensely meaningful, as opposed to the intransience and hollowness of the forthcoming marriage. Furthermore, Héloïse’s personal experience of music is safe from appropriation by the patriarchal powers which she ardently resisted until Marianne’s arrival. 

However, this reading is problematised by the fact that the orchestra is never shown onscreen. We cannot be sure, then, that the music exists in the diegesis. “Summer” is acousmatic, a term associated with film sound theorist Michel Chion which refers to a sound whose source is not visible.34 For Chion, “acousmatic sound maintains suspense, constituting a dramatic technique in itself.”35 Suspense is created because the invisibility of a sound’s source prevents us from fully apprehending the nature of the sound, or the object producing it.36 In Portrait’s final scene, we are presented first with a long-shot of Héloïse sidling along the circle of the auditorium; the camera pans left but halts when Héloïse sits, only the very corner of the stage is visible. In additional to replicating Marianne’s head movement as she watches Héloïse travel across her field of vision, the directional camera movement and its premature stopping signals that Marianne’s attention is solely on Héloïse, rather than the stage. Like an imperfect cadence, our attention is drawn to an expected halting point, but this goal is denied. When the music starts and we have still not been shown the orchestra, the acousmatic nature of the concerto is emphasised.

Because it is acousmatic, we cannot be sure that “Summer” is diegetic at all. Marianne and Héloïse might be attending any musical or theatrical performance, the encounter a mere coincidence.37 “Summer,” heard as non-diegetic, again becomes a re-invocation of that pivotal moment shared at the harpsichord, however with a different effect. Non-diegetic music is often inferred as commenting on the narrative with an implicit distance from the action. It thereby encourages a different kind of identification with the onscreen characters as the music seems to communicate their interior emotions.38 Here, the shot-reverse-shot complex focalises through Marianne, encouraging the spectator to place themselves in her position.39 The following shot of Héloïse seems now to be from Marianne’s perspective and, as such, the music might express her emotional state. The high-energy strings capture the complex emotions she likely feels upon seeing the woman she loved. Whereas a diegetic reading suggests that the characters are seeking out “Summer” as a way of experiencing the love they once had, a non-diegetic reading implies that this feeling is more pervasive – in Héloïse at least – reignited at any musical event even years after the affair.40

But when taking into account the effect of the extended push-in shot onto Héloïse, any semblance of narratological stability vanishes from this scene. Over its protracted length, the spectator loses the sense that we are watching Héloïse from Marianne’s point-of-view, and instead we are drawn into Héloïse’s mind. The sense of voyeurism we might feel as we regard Héloïse from afar eventually dissolves as the push-in stops at an intimate close-up. “Summer,” still understood as non-diegetic, seems now to sonify Héloïse’s emotional state rather than Marianne’s. The music appears to capture both women’s emotional states – one then the other’s. Although Héloïse is unaware of Marianne’s gaze, through its fluid narratological position “Summer” suggests that their romance remains of profound importance to her, even after Héloïse’s life has been forcibly aligned with the normative path. We might therefore see the lovers as emotionally together despite being apart in all other ways, or, in Fox’s words, a “sonic proximity” has been traced between them.41

So, is “Summer” diegetic or non-diegetic? The short answer is neither. Or both. Or perhaps one and then the other. It seems to me that it is impossible to be sure of the music’s narratological position. Rather than accepting this openness at face value, I consider it worth probing further into the meanings of the ambiguity within the context of the film, many other aspects of which also remain unresolved. The ambiguity afforded to “Summer”, then, can be harnessed to provide a reading of the film which folds music and sound design into an analysis of Portrait’s central themes of the gaze: non-normative love, and the Ovidian myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Moreover, the dramatic context of this ambiguity might stimulate a means of identifying an optimistic note to this film’s otherwise markedly forlorn conclusion.

2: Acts of Turning

As previously alluded to, the act of turning is a central theme in the film, centred most obviously in the film’s engagement with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Héloïse’s interpretation of the fateful moment – in which Orpheus turns back to Eurydice and damns her to the underworld forever – highlights the presumption that Eurydice bares no agency over her fate. Eurydice’s agency, for Héloïse, materialises in her voice. “Turn around” not only becomes a sonic marker of her presence to Orpheus (for whom she is invisible), but it also alters the balance of power between the two. Although it remains Orpheus’ prerogative to turn or not, Eurydice now plays an active role in his decision rather than following him passively (and presumably silently), waiting to find out her fate. Even if, like for Héloïse in Portrait, Eurydice’s fate is already sealed, she decides that she would prefer to see her lover’s face than risk dying without saying goodbye. In a way then, by uttering “turn around,” Eurydice asserts her agency and transforms the moment into a collaboration wherein power is spread evenly over both parties. Héloïse’s transformative reading of the myth is heard only once in the film but nevertheless resounds across the film’s runtime. 

In order to explore Portrait’s engagement with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and integrate its effects with the film’s sound, I now turn to queer theory. In her seminal 2006 text Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed dissects the concept of “sexual orientation” through a philosophical lens. Essential to phenomenology is the contention that objects near to us shape our self-understanding. Who and what we turn towards and away from affect the ways we live our lives.42 ‘Turning towards’ people of my own gender might mean that I am less likely to follow the expected life-path involving settling for a single partner and raising children.43 Ahmed invokes metaphors of lines, orientation, and directionality from phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. She argues that lives can be understood as paths: non-normative, queer lines are those which fail to follow conventional, straight life-paths. “Lines,” writes Ahmed “are both created by being followed and followed by being created.”44 When the majority of life-paths align, the conventional life-path becomes adopted as the only “natural” life-path, just as the guiding lines beneath a sheet of tracing paper seem to disappear.45 Knowledge of the “natural” way to live causes this to be the only known acceptable way to do so.

Turning, for Ahmed, is a mode of subject formation.46 To turn around is to recognise oneself as the intended recipient of a call. Ahmed adds that the direction we turn is important for the direction we subsequently take. In Ahmed’s language, Marianne and Héloïse are “turned towards” each other when they can love each other openly and are “turned away” from each other when Héloïse is forced along her predetermined life-path into marriage. But, of course, the women do not want to part, and so even though Héloïse remains queerly misaligned this must remain invisible. On the island, Marianne must initially face Héloïse tentatively, momentarily, and without revealing that she is doing so. When Héloïse does agree to sit, however, she demonstrates to Marianne that she is in fact turned towards the painter by shrewdly asking Marianne, “if you look at me, who do I look at?” before listing minutiae of Marianne’s behaviour which she had been observing (01:05:31). Marianne’s speechlessness at this challenge to the painterly gaze bespeaks of her growing realisation that the two women have been in the process of turning towards one another for some time now.

Physical directionality therefore mirrors phenomenological directionality in Portrait. We can also see this in a pair of scenes which bracket Marianne and Héloïse’s time together on the island. At first meeting, Marianne descends a staircase to see the back of a figure in a dark, hooded cloak (00:19:00). The figure, Héloïse, opens the door without speaking and begins walking out into the grounds towards the cliffs. She suddenly breaks into a run, her hood falling to reveal her blonde hair. Marianne runs after her and begins to panic as Héloïse nears the cliffs – she is reminded of Héloïse’s late sister, who, on a walk with Sophie, committed suicide, falling to her death from these cliffs. Sophie was walking ahead of the unnamed sister and “didn’t hear her call out” as she fell. It comes as a relief for Marianne, then, when Héloïse stops at the cliff and turns, grinning and panting. “I have dreamt of doing that for years,” she says, facing Marianne for the first time. “Dying?” Marianne asks. “No, running,” is the response (00:19:49). The jump-cuts in this sequence leave it open as to whether Marianne called out to Héloïse to stop her from jumping – just as it is left ambiguous in Orpheus and Eurydice – so it seems that Héloïse chooses to turn on her own volition.47 Jackie Stacey asserts that Héloïse’s actions here “[confirm] life instead of death … On reaching the precipice, [Héloïse] turns away from her sister towards living, and towards the ‘companion’ who will become her lover.”48 In turning away from death, Héloïse also attempts to turn away from the social demise of her looming marriage. Turning towards Marianne, then, allows her to experience the joy of lesbian love. However, in doing so, this makes inevitable her second death when she and Marianne must part.

This second death takes the form of Marianne’s departure, which mirrors the women’s meeting in a number of ways. As I described above, Marianne’s last sight of Héloïse on the island occurs after an instruction to “turn around.” This time, Marianne is the cloaked figure about to pass through the threshold and it is Héloïse who descends the staircase. The image of Héloïse adorned in her glowing white dress is the inescapable image which haunts both women from their first meeting. When Héloïse calls to Marianne to turn around, she is asking the painter to make a choice. Should she choose to turn, Marianne would be taking the poet’s choice, damning the image of a lost Héloïse to her memory but allowing her a final moment of agency; should she not turn, Marianne would not be forced to come to terms with the finality of Héloïse’s fate. In turning, Marianne’s failure to rescue Héloïse from the underworld is highlighted. But, as this failure was pre-ordained, turning becomes a commitment to memory, to looking back at their shared love. “To be the follower who bids the departing lover to turn around is to make the murder a collaboration,” declares Stacey, who continues, noting the ambiguity of this final act: 

Is Marianne to bear witness to the social death of the bride-to-be; is Héloïse confirming the agency of a woman deemed to have none; or is this a romantic performative through which both women make a commitment to remembrance in testing the consequences of this previously contested scene? The impossibility of their desire confirms its continuation.49

Representations of turning also figure in the film’s final moments. The women’s misaligned gazes reflect once again their phenomenological positioning. Even though Marianne (and the audience) perhaps wish for Héloïse to return the gaze, to turn back and look at her observer, we know that this will never happen. Marianne sees Héloïse quite literally aligned with the normative life-path, seemingly unable to either avert her gaze or rotate her body for the entire protracted duration of the final shot. Her true self (the self she could be with Marianne) has been damned to an underworld existence away from Marianne and, as such, cannot face her anymore. Equally, this lengthy shot also reveals Marianne as stuck in her directionality. As opposed to Héloïse, Marianne is overtly queerly oriented. Transfixed by a subject away from the stage, it is her queer orientation towards Héloïse which causes the musical-narratological complexity of the final shot. The orchestra remains offscreen and therefore acousmatic. Additionally, Marianne’s life-path is decidedly aberrant: a female painter who submits paintings to exhibitions through her father’s name, teaches painting to young girls, and attends concerts. Her choice to turn away from men extends into her life beyond her sexual object choice. As Ahmed writes, “to act on lesbian desire is a way of reorientating one's relation not just toward sexual others, but also to a world that has already ‘decided’ how bodies should be oriented in the first place.”50 Two women’s misaligned gazes thus become a microcosm of their social realities.

How, then, does the music’s ambiguous position interact with these questions of turning and orientation? In her 2007 essay titled “The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic,” Robynn Stilwell theorises sonic crossings from diegetic to non-diegetic states, or vice versa. On this traversal, she points out that,

The movies have taught us how to construct our phenomenological geography, and when we are set adrift, we are not only uneasy, we are open to being guided in any number of directions. It is the multiplicity of possibilities that makes the gap both observable and fantastical – fantastical because it changes the state, not only of the filmic moment, but also of the observer’s relationship to it.51

Ahmed’s work might be understood as similarly probing the “phenomenological geography” of queerness in society. While it might be tenuous to go so far as to map the diegetic/non-diegetic states onto homo/heterosexual, the parallels between Stilwell and Ahmed approaches are worth remarking on. They both construct a conceptual space around the binary, and explore it from a first-person, spectatorial perspective – in Ahmed’s case it is by taking the position of the queer person turning towards and away from others; in Stilwell’s it is by exploring how music’s narratological position guides the spectator. People are ‘guided’ along life-paths, and the guidelines become visible to both themselves and those around them when they aberrate from them, just as filmic conventions become apparent to the spectator.

In a way, then, to reside in the fantastical gap is to be disorientated, misaligned, or turned away. Just like the queer person whose life-path eschews the guides that they have been given and are expected to follow, the spectator who is “set adrift” becomes aware of the multitude of possibilities afforded by the cinematic medium, the instability of its binary formations, and the porousness of its boundaries. Comparably, the queer person who takes the aberrant life-path becomes aware of numerous possible life-paths outside those prescribed by cis-heteronormative society. Portrait’s 18th-century setting, of course, stages the divergent life-paths of Marianne, a middle-class painter free to explore her sexuality, and Héloïse, an aristocratic woman bound to marriage. So, neither wholly diegetic nor non-diegetic, “Summer” resists normative readings and instead allows the spectator to take a ‘different path’ into ambiguity and meanings untethered from conventional narrative techniques. 

Resonant with the themes of non-normative artistic practice identified by Pelling, Portrait eschews the narrative closure expected at the end of a feature film. The positioning of “Summer” in the fantastical gap adds to the open-endedness of the film. Corresponding with the characters’ inability to settle on an interpretation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the film chooses indeterminacy for its central couple. Sciamma herself refuses to be pinned down to an interpretation of the myth, instead languishing in the debate which stages the “intellectual process of falling in love.”52 Such fluidity, argues Michèle Bacholle, is a marker of contemporary queer identification which resides in Portrait.53 The ambiguity afforded by “Summer” might therefore be viewed within Suarez’s rubric of queer cinematic sound, which contravenes conventional narrative functions.54 His description of “sound’s ability to destabilise the reproduction and transmission of straightforward, readable, univocal genders and sexualities” maps onto Héloïse in Portrait.55 “Summer” leaves us not with answers but Orphic questions: which way do we turn? Towards the heartbreak of a relationship which we know will never again be enjoyed? Or towards a gratitude that, despite its unavoidable curtailment, this relationship was experienced?

3: Ambiguity, Collaboration, Interchangeability: Queer Love across Boundaries

Such ambiguity evidently plagues Héloïse, who flashes a sequence of diverse emotions as she stares offscreen. Marianne, meanwhile, with an expressionless face and steadfast gaze, ultimately utters the words “she did not see me.” She also likely does not know how to remember Héloïse. After spending so much time getting to know each other, Marianne and Héloïse are left illegible to one another, and to the audience as well. However, as I have attempted to show through this essay, a reading centred on sound in the film, and especially the music, allows for an avenue to locate a streak of optimism in the film’s conclusion. In this final section, I will attempt to locate this optimism in a facet of the film much-explored with respect to Portrait’s visual themes: interchangeability of subject position. The film’s central dynamic of the portraitist and their subject commences in its original, patriarchal form of a painter observing their subject, and slowly morphs into dynamic marked by collaboration and interchangeability. 

In Sciamma’s words, “there is no muse. The model and the artist are co-creators.”56 This is articulated most clearly in the revision of the betrothal portrait. As Bacholle notes, the first portrait – created by Marianne without Héloïse’s consent or knowledge – represents Marianne’s “collusion with the Countess and the patriarchal heteronormative order.”57 The second portrait, however, is a collaboration between the women. Héloïse’s askew body position represents for Bacholle the misalignment of Héloïse’s sexual experience, echoed in her offscreen gaze in the final shot.58 Of course, for Marianne, the portrait of Héloïse signifies the inevitability of the end of their relationship – the transformation of Héloïse into her mere image – but the painting of the portrait structures the women’s growing romance. Stacey argues that the “increasing interchangeability of looking and desiring between the artist and sitter organizes the erotic intimacy between the two women.”59 From the moment Marianne positions Héloïse on the pedestal to be painted, the meaning of their mutual gazing starts to shift: first from intense study, then to scrutiny in search of attraction in the other, and finally into the regard of lovers.

The interchangeability of subject positions in a queer musical context has been usefully theorised by Suzanne Cusick. In her 1994 essay “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight,” Cusick describes listening as a profoundly intimate act – to such an extent that she compares musical performance to lesbian sex.60 There exists a circularity to musical performance, in which the performer controls the music which reverberates back into them, reflexively affecting the music production. Cusick confesses that,

A great deal of pleasure derives from the jumbling of who’s on top – am I playing [the music] or is she playing me? In all performances that give me joy, the answer is unclear – we are both on top, both on our backs, both wholly ourselves and wholly mingled with each other. Power circulates freely across porous boundaries; the categories [of] player and player, lover and beloved, dissolve.61

Portrait’s dissolution of the boundary between artist and muse might be likened to Cusick’s experience in performance. Who is the artist and who is the muse in a portrait created by lovers? Stevens notes that “part of Portrait’s beauty consists in that continuous shimmering exchange of roles.”62 Recall, for example, the women’s meeting and Marianne’s departure: first Marianne descends the stairs to see a cloaked Héloïse, and later Héloïse calls to Marianne who is about to cross the threshold. Of course, the political edge to Cusick’s argument is mirrored in Portrait –interchangeability of subject positions garners an equality which “refuses to play the game [of the] ‘phallic economy.’”63 During the time Héloïse’s mother is away, Marianne and Héloïse frequently take on the tasks of Sophie the maid, for example cooking the evening meal to allow Sophie to work on her embroidery. The absence of men or Héloïse’s mother (who channels the patriarch) on the island abolishes the class boundaries, allowing the women to relish in the freedom to exchange household roles.

We might also locate this interchangeability in the film’s concluding moments. As mentioned above, the extended push-in onto Héloïse causes a shift in the shot’s focalisation. As a long shot, it seems like we are viewing Héloïse from Marianne’s perspective across the auditorium. But as the shot continues, the sense of voyeurism diminishes and instead we focus on Héloïse and her emotions. “Summer,” heard as non-diegetic, sonifies Marianne’s, and then Héloïse’s, emotions. This is again reminiscent of the moment when Héloïse revealed her returned gaze to Marianne: “forgive me, I’d hate to be in your place,” the painter apologises (01:05:04). To which Héloïse responds, with a touch of bitterness, “we’re in the same place. Exactly the same place,” before proceeding to list her observations about Marianne. The boundaries between the lovers’ subject positions in the auditorium are likewise rendered porous through the music’s narratological positioning. Manifest in sound, the women’s emotions are revealed to be shared. Another of Albertine Fox’s “sonic proximities” has been traced between the two women. Therefore, even though not so much as a glance was caught, this encounter counts as one of Pelling’s “peripheral spaces” through which the couple manages to communicate.64

The music’s narratological ambiguity affords this interchangeability of subject position, not only because it seems to represent both women’s interior feelings, but also because of its ambiguous position with respect to the diegesis. Like Hart and Schirrmacher’s example in which the troubling of perceptual binaries leads to the destabilisation of conceptual binaries, narratological ambiguity in this scene questions the notion that the women’s relationship has concluded, that Marianne and Héloïse, despite never being able to be physically present with each other, can nevertheless continue their romance in memory. The conflicting emotions which linger in the women – a yearning for what might have been, that the women were nevertheless fortunate to experience – are left unresolved. What made Orpheus turn around? Was he making the poet’s choice, as Marianne suggests, or the lover’s, according to Sophie? Was Marianne correct in making the poet’s choice to commit Héloïse to memory as she left the island? As Fox has noted, Portrait’s ambiguities “undermine cinematic strategies that objectify, fetishise, or erase lesbian sexuality on screen.”65 Consistent with the porousness of boundaries in lesbian sex, Portrait’s ambiguities work to queer effect.

Moreover, the positioning of “Summer” has an additional queer effect: it forces the spectator to question their understanding of what they are shown, if only momentarily. The question “Can the characters hear the music?” might lead to “If not ‘Summer,” what is so affecting to Héloïse?” and then onto “Did Héloïse, in fact, spot Marianne and chose not to return her gaze?” Such questions compound the film’s open-endedness, which, according to Clara Bradbury-Rance, refuses to settle for “the agenda of ‘queer’ visibility” often marked by the director’s mastery over their film. Bradbury-Rance asks “did you see that? Did it really happen? Or did I misremember?”66 Such questions might be going through Marianne’s mind upon seeing Héloïse. As a sapphic woman isolated in an uncomprehending society, she doubts that she will see her former lover again, whether their love persists, or perhaps whether the cherished experience happened the way she remembers it. Like Hart and Schirrmacher note, ambiguities perform a kind of “sabotage,” insofar as they “[draw] attention to the film as fiction.”67

But are Marianne and Héloïse not once again “in exactly the same place”? “Summer,” whether it is heard by the characters in the auditorium or exists only for the audience to here, reasserts that primary facet of Marianne and Héloïse’s relationship: equality and collaboration. It might seem obvious to say that their relationship was a result of a collaboration, but I believe this to be true on a number of levels. Beyond the collaboration on the portrait itself, it took Marianne to destroy the first portrait for Héloïse to have a reason to ask her mother to keep the painter on the island. As Stacey points out, the utterance “turn around” turns Eurydice/Héloïse’s fate into a collaboration between lovers rather than the fault of one party whose power as a saviour was always already illusory. Heard to cross non-diegetically between the two women, “Summer” transforms the commitment to memory into a joint effort: heard as diegetic, “Summer” proves that this commitment has already been made. Music’s ambiguities – to recall Paulin – allow “Summer” to become the locus of memory for the women in a way that the portrait of Héloïse’s never could. Even if the women themselves cannot be sure of which way to turn, “Summer’s” narratological ambiguity gestures to the audience that all is not lost. “Summer” proves that even fleeting moments can persist, that even misaligned lives can connect, and suggests that Marianne and Héloïse’s queer love might remain alive, even if lost to the underworld of memory.

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Media Cited

Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Directed by Céline Sciamma. Film.  Paris: Lillies Films; Arte France Cinéma; Hold Up Films. 2019.

Biography

Noah Jay is a writer, video essayist, and composer whose research centres around the music and sound of queer media. Having achieved a BA in Music from Queens' College, Cambridge – where he received the President's Prize for 'significant distinction' in examinations – he is now studying at Goldsmiths for an MA in Music and Audiovisual Cultures. Films he has worked on have been screened at the BFI and he has published a book review for the Music, Sound, and the Moving Image journal. Other research interests include the internet and Electronic Dance Music cultures as well as questions of sound in religious practice.