Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the Best Thing on Hulu Right Now

There are some movies that - once the lights come up and I sit there, emotionally exhausted - remind me why this is my favorite art medium. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is one such movie; a film where every single shot is a gorgeous painting all its own. When combined, they tell a beautiful and moving story about love and liberation. It’s nothing short of a masterpiece.

Directed by French filmmaker Céline Sciamma, the film follows Marianne (Noémie Merlant), a painter hired to paint a wedding portrait for a woman named Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). Héloïse’s upcoming marriage is an arranged one, and her heartbreak over her lack of freedom manifests in a cold, silent, but furious demeanor. Marianne’s job is to capture Héloïse’s essence on canvas, but neither woman can be fully satisfied with the work until Marianne is able to actually understand and see her subject.

One could view this as a sort of gender-swapped Call Me by Your Name (albeit the relationship is a bit more age appropriate), and it is very much like it in the way that it uses silence, faces, and distance to ignite sparks more so than dialogue. What’s important and what builds the tension isn’t what’s said between the two characters, it’s in what’s not said. Portrait of a Lady on Fire plays out with no musical score - apart from a single haunting and ominous hymn - and every look between the two women is scorching. It’s an incredibly sensual film, but the passion is far beyond mere sexual desire. The two women envy and seek the other’s small bastions of freedom: Marianne wishes she could openly express her feelings the way Héloïse isn’t afraid to, and Héloïse resents Marianne’s freedom that comes with her occupation.

Sciamma’s film doesn’t just refreshingly lack the male gaze; it obliterates it. The sole time that a man appears onscreen, it’s almost as if it’s a jump scare. Yet its love story very obviously takes place in a man’s world - our depressingly real one. But for one short summer, it feels like it doesn’t. Devastating and empowering, sexy and elegant, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a stunning and honest work of art.

I’m done now. It’s streaming on Hulu right this seond. Watch it and remember that movies are good.