The best movie of the year is streaming on Hulu

By Jacob Skubish

This review is spoiler free.

It’s been a rough year for the movies. Current releases are being postponed, future productions are being pushed back, and theaters are shuttering, some possibly for good. But there is a sliver of good news as we all stay in our homes, because the best movie of the year (and one of the best movies I’ve ever seen) is now streaming on Hulu.

That movie is Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a French drama about two women in a doomed romance that on its surface sounds like the sort of gooey, erotic drivel Seinfeld expertly parodied with Rochelle, Rochelle. But the film is layers deeper than anything of that ilk, and hits on visual, emotional, and intellectual levels in equal measure.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire stars Noémie Merlant as Marianne, a young painter hired to paint a portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) before Héloïse is arranged to be married. There is a catch, however: Héloïse is opposed to the marriage and has refused to be painted, so her mother has hired Marianne covertly. Marianne pretends to be a companion for Héloïse, who has been cooped up in her secluded waterside home, as she tries to gather enough of an image of Héloïse to paint in her spare time.

It’s a more difficult task than it sounds: for the first 20 minutes of the film Héloïse is talked about but obscured from view, building suspense around her introduction like the shark in Jaws. The waiting leads to a spectacular payoff shot when we finally see Héloïse’s expressive face; contrasted with the searching, magnetic presence of Marianne, the two are established as distinct figures early.

Marianne

Héloïse

Even after Héloïse comes into focus, Marianne still struggles with the assignment. Haenel’s face is maddeningly unreadable; there exist traces of anger, and mistrust, and amusement, but only in flashes. Marianne starts with small steps: learning the curvature of Héloïse’s ears, or trying to make her laugh for the first time. There’s an incredible tension to their relationship because it starts not with romantic interest but mutual curiosity. You don’t know what they want the relationship to be, and neither do they, but you want to see where it’s going.

Marianne manages to complete the portrait, and when she finally tells Héloïse the truth her subject is disappointed. “Is that how you see me?” Héloïse asks. “No life, no presence?” Marianne knows she is right: she has created something standard to the rules and conventions of the time but altogether lifeless and empty. She scraps the portrait and starts over, and her relationship with Héloïse transforms as well.

It is in this harmony between the nature of art and the nature of love that director Céline Sciamma’s film becomes something special. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire art is not something that can be captured if its subject is not known, and love is not something that can be known without feeling it.

In one scene Marianne plays a piano piece for an enraptured Héloïse, and Héloïse asks Marianne to describe an orchestra. “It’s not easy to relate music,” Marianne replies. In another scene Marianne tells Héloïse she’s experienced love, and Héloïse asks what that was like. “It’s hard to say,” Marianne says. And yet the film manages to end with a breathtaking scene that combines the indescribability of these two concepts into something felt deeply.

What makes Portrait of a Lady on Fire a masterpiece is that the film itself mirrors this transformation. The movie begins as an intellectual study of forbidden love, but after watching the relationship unfold on screen you can’t help but feel as if you’ve just known love yourself. There is a paradox in the film’s title: to see or be a woman on fire is to experience something visceral, but to see a portrait of such a figure is only to observe secondhand. The film succeeds because we have forged an emotional connection with the subject: the portrait is beautifully composed, but we can also feel the heat of the flame.