‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’: The smoldering lesbian romance snubbed by the Oscars

Racy lesbian sex scenes put the French movie “Blue Is the Warmest Color” on the map back in 2013. The director of a new French film, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” would like you to know the “Blue” eroticism was mostly nonsense.

“That is a film made by a straight man with straight women,” says “Portrait” director Céline Sciamma. “I’m a lesbian, so I think I know about intimacy and lesbian imaginaires [imagination]. We are making it closer to reality.”

Set in the 18th century, the dazzling feature from auteur Sciamma (“Girlhood”) follows the relationship between an upper-class young woman, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), and a painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant). She’s hired to paint Héloïse’s picture for a potential husband — over the woman’s objections to both the painting and the arranged marriage — and the two fall in love. It’s a slow burn of a romance, with a visual style that evokes the paintings of the era.

Denied France’s Oscar nomination slot despite rave reviews, Sciamma’s film, opening around the US this week, bucks the trend of muting women’s voices on-screen. A study from San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that women made up 34 percent of all speaking characters in 2019 films.

“Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” in contrast, has scarcely any male characters. “I like to think of films as rides. This is an opportunity to go through a new ride,” says Sciamma. “Women feel seen by the film. And they don’t get that opportunity as much, to identify with characters as much as men.”

Merlant says the film is packed with rarely depicted moments, including an at-home abortion. “My character doesn’t want to look, and Héloïse asks me to look,” Merlant says of the scene. “It’s a way to say this is something we don’t want to talk about, we don’t want to see, and it’s something that happens every day.” When films omit the thornier parts of women’s lives, she says, “we miss a big part of women’s history.”

But “Portrait” isn’t just for women, she adds: “It’s an invitation to men, also. We invite men to see something different.”

Following last week’s historic Best Picture Oscar for South Korea’s “Parasite,” there’s ever more hope for international films like “Portrait” to find a wider audience, of all genders. As director Bong Joon Ho said at the Golden Globes, “Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” Bong ran into Sciamma at an Oscars afterparty, and she congratulated him for breaking the barrier: “Incredible! This is like the future,” she said. “You made this. You made it for us all.”