Céline Sciamma

[DarkImbecile]

Céline Sciamma (1978- )



"Cinema is the only place, the only art ever, where you share somebody’s loneliness."

Filmography
Features
Naissance des pieuvres / Water Lilies (2007)
Tomboy (2011)
Bande de filles / Girlhood (2014)
Portrait de la jeune fille en feu / Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

Shorts
"Pauline" (2010) [french audio only / burned-in English subtitles]


Web Resources
2007 interview with David Jenkins, TimeOut
2008 interview with Jessica Robertson, GO Magazine
2011 interview with Elise Fuchs, Pop Matters
2011 interview with Rosy Hunt, Take One
2015 interview with Steve Macfarlane, BOMB
2015 interview with Alex Heeney, Seventh Row
2015 interview with Zack Etheart, Interview
2019 interview with Rich Juzwiak, Jezebel
2019 interview with Marta Bałaga, Cineuropa
2019 interview with Amy Taubin, Film Comment
2019 interview with Marshall Shafer, Slant Magazine
2019 interview with Kate Erbland, Indiewire
2019 interview with Adèle Haenel and Rachel Handler, Vulture
2019 video interview with Tricia Tuttle at the London Film Festival, BFI
2019 video interview with Tommaso Tocci, IonCinema
"How ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ Sees Power in Two Women in Love", Elizabeth Harris, New York Times (2020)
2020 interview with Emily VanDerWerff, Vox

Forum Discussion
Forthcoming: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

[senseabove]

In anticipation of finally getting to see Portrait of a Lady on Fire sometime in the next week, I watched Sciamma's Tomboy last night, and I'm a little surprised at how thoroughly enamored I am of this unassuming movie. My initial thought is that it's almost perfectly restrained, focusing solely on the titular character's developing complexity, and restricting its subject to their self-awareness, self-presentation, and the gendered assumptions that swirl around it. (Unfortunately, the subtitles don't even try to translate the implicitness of the founding assumption (my French is not even close to fluent, but this still seems noteworthy): Laure/Mikael goes to wander around their family's new apartment building and is greeted by one of the kids, Lisa, with the masculine "t'es nouveau?" rather than the feminine "t'es nouvelle?")

The choices related to that self-presentation do, of course, have an effect on the other characters, but even those characters and their reactions function as ways to situate different facets of it, and different levels of Laure/Mikael's self-awareness of gender in those interpersonal situations. A subject like this could be so easily saddled with political and moral concerns, but aside from one brief conversation that necessarily recharacterizes what could be taken as moral condemnation, or at least discomfort, in order to move on, its focus is Laure/Mikael's microsocial experiences. Sciamma sticks to a familiarly intimate directorial style, following close-shot, bracingly naturalistic performances from a gaggle of children, often with an agile, handheld camera, but along that casualness she strings infrequent personal moments, usually with Laure/Mikael alone, that achieve a somehow still congruous and utterly arresting painterly composition. Starting from assumptions about gender which are much more publicly and consciously held by many people nearly a decade after its release, and working smoothly toward a true-feeling inevitability in its climax, it's understatement may be exactly what's so surprising. And yet it could also be an excellent film to show someone who has never considered or had to consider what it might be like to not feel at home in your assigned/assumed gender precisely because it is so non-didactic.

[knives]

You should probably mention My Life as a Zucchini in the credits as well especially since it contains so much of her artistic personality.

Even though I didn't like Water Lilies feeling that it was a leaden Breillet knock-off her subsequent work definitely places her as one of the best living directors. In part this is because her emphasis on camaraderie feels so abandoned in this day and age that she stands as fairly unique.

[spectre]

In anticipation of finally getting to see Portrait of a Lady on Fire sometime in the next week, I watched Sciamma's Tomboy last night, and I'm a little surprised at how thoroughly enamored I am of this unassuming movie. My initial thought is that it's almost perfectly restrained, focusing solely on the titular character's developing complexity, and restricting its subject to their self-awareness, self-presentation, and the gendered assumptions that swirl around it. (Unfortunately, the subtitles don't even try to translate the implicitness of the founding assumption (my French is not even close to fluent, but this still seems noteworthy): Laure/Mikael goes to wander around their family's new apartment building and is greeted by one of the kids, Lisa, with the masculine "t'es nouveau?" rather than the feminine "t'es nouvelle?")

The choices related to that self-presentation do, of course, have an effect on the other characters, but even those characters and their reactions function as ways to situate different facets of it, and different levels of Laure/Mikael's self-awareness of gender in those interpersonal situations. A subject like this could be so easily saddled with political and moral concerns, but aside from one brief conversation that necessarily recharacterizes what could be taken as moral condemnation, or at least discomfort, in order to move on, its focus is Laure/Mikael's microsocial experiences. Sciamma sticks to a familiarly intimate directorial style, following close-shot, bracingly naturalistic performances from a gaggle of children, often with an agile, handheld camera, but along that casualness she strings infrequent personal moments, usually with Laure/Mikael alone, that achieve a somehow still congruous and utterly arresting painterly composition. Starting from assumptions about gender which are much more publicly and consciously held by many people nearly a decade after its release, and working smoothly toward a true-feeling inevitability in its climax, it's understatement may be exactly what's so surprising. And yet it could also be an excellent film to show someone who has never considered or had to consider what it might be like to not feel at home in your assigned/assumed gender precisely because it is so non-didactic.

This is an excellent summary. Incidentally, I was reading the first Famous Five book to my five-year-old son last night, and couldn't help but be reminded of Tomboy in its portrayal of George (who is so obviously represented as transgender – as opposed to merely being a girl who wants to do "boy" things – that I was astonished that this had never previously occurred to me or, it seems, many other readers who grew up with the books).

Of course, Tomboy carries some of that ambiguity too, and I'm not sure that Sciamma is necessarily trying to put a definitive label on Laure/Mikael, but this seems a very specific experience of growing up that hasn't been represented much in either literature or cinema – so it's interesting to see that quality shared by a) a 2010s "arthouse" film by one of the most respected contemporary European queer filmmakers and b) an extremely popular book written by perhaps the most white-bread, old-fashioned and conservative-beloved of all British children's authors.

[therewillbeblus]

I think I preferred Girlhood to Tomboy but both were lovely and I like knives’ point about camaraderie, moreover how not only social connection but the specific transitive process of acceptance of identity beyond sharing commonalities is key to feeling whole. Sciamma doesn’t beat around the bush in this as a social world where our validation and sense of self-respect comes from others. What I love about Portrait of a Lady on Fire is that this covers familiar territory while also embarking on a more intimate path of the deepest learning taking place here, not in the conventional sense of wisdom, though there’s that too, but the emotional intelligence that comes from learning about another - and even though this actually provides self-knowledge later Sciamma suggests that this might not be as important as what learning about that person through being present does for them. It’s empathy on steroids because it doesn’t need to come back to the subject to matter.

[colinr0380]

If you all don't mind, I'll copy across my older comment on Girlhood from the "Upcoming Movies on UK TV" thread to this one. Spoilers follow:

I really liked Girlhood, though I think its much better if seen less through an 'ethnographic Ken Loach social realist' lens than as being sort of in the vein of a gangster crime drama! This might just be me but I liked it even more when I started thinking that it had some strange structural similarities to something like the 1983 Scarface, as a girl falls in with local gangs, gets introduced to drugs and catfights to prove superiority amongst local gangs, all whilst having coercive family troubles (including a sister who potentially may be following in her footsteps whom she wants to keep ‘pure’ and unsullied). She eventually seems in danger of losing her kindly aspects of her nature as she begins to enjoy the power of her new lifestyle (with the suggestion that she is maybe giving into her violent tendencies in herself that have always been there) and the way that she 'hardens' as she moves from being coerced by her abusive brother and from being an onlooker on the sidelines of gangs into becoming a central figure of these situations and taking more control of her life (it is a pretty good film for showing that process of being 'indoctrinated' ever deeper into a troubling criminal underworld, not just because you have to through your life circumstances but also because there are some elements of friendship and belonging there which make linking up seem appealing too). Though in taking that control of her own life she eventually has to let go of a number of people, and become more callous and detached from the situations around her. Especially when she gets pushed into ‘actual, more official’ (i.e. male) criminal gangs, where she is more reductively (but simultaneously powerfully?) used as a glamorous figure wandering through posh parties in a white wig and red dress to dispense drugs to the clients. It might only be one small degree of separation from the prostitute she now shares a flat with, but at least she has her own football computer game that she can play with the sound on, unlike when she was living with the abusive brother! (Much to the consternation of her rather useless boyfriend, who after a really great 'ilicit first kiss' scene in a gloomy stairwell amusingly just becomes kind of the ‘gangster’s moll’ figure of the film, getting used for sex and rightly rebuffed at the very end of the film when he belatedly tries to ‘protect’ Vic by wanting to marry her just after she has dealt with all of the worst trials of life that she perhaps could have used his help in facing earlier! I also like at the mid-point of the film, when Vic is flying her highest, she decides to go and 'claim her prize' in the middle of the night, objectifying her boyfriend as an ownable status symbol much as Al Pacino claimed Michelle Pfeiffer for his own at the mid-point of Scarface!)

It’s a little strange in its implied message that the actual criminal gang at the end is perhaps where Vic really, unquestionably, belongs. Especially in a society where there are no other viable options given beyond the basics of education or menial work. The early sections of the film are perhaps a bit obvious in setting up these aspects, from the way that all the groups of girls chattering quieten down when passing by the looming gangs of guys, or the distrust of the education system, or the vaguely sketched in, barely present mother busy working a menial cleaning job, who is only able to try to get Vic into a similar cleaning job where she works. Something which causes Vic to make her first steps towards independence by threatening the boss into firing her!

It is kind of a film about Vic moving through her ‘girlhood’ in the form of groups essential for her development that have to be ‘grown through’ in some ways. The mother is barely there even at the beginning, with the coercive brother being the big issue to deal with. Then after being rejected from school for poor test results (the break with ‘normal society’) Vic falls in with the gang of ‘cool girls’ who initially treat Vic badly until she gets in with them. They introduce her to busting out dance moves, glamorous (though slightly too mature for their age) dresses, drug-induced karaoke miming to Rhianna numbers and fistfights with other local girlgangs for their tanktops which get posted on social media for the world, or at least the block, to see (it kind of goes a bit Switchblade Sisters at some points!). But even this gang, who we spent the majority of the film with, start to fall apart. We see that some of them have menial cleaning jobs too, or that there was a previous fourth member of the gang before Vic who left when she got pregnant. One of the other members of the gang who Vic looks up to, Lady, gets beaten and humiliated in one of the girlfights and it falls to Vic to fight to regain the honour not just of Lady but of their gang too. And worst of all, we later find that Lady’s actual name isn’t that appropriate for a no nonsense tough girl! It is all rather disillusioning for Vic and is fascinating but emotionally painful to see her move from wide-eyed hero worship through full acceptance to finally growing past the gang that meant so much to her in her formative years (as well as from compliance to her brother’s threats and the protection of her sisters, to having to abandon them all and escape that family situation), all at the age of 16!

I love the staging of that final shot too, as Vic makes an attempt to contact her younger sister only to walk off when she answers the intercom and then we get the magnificent shot that encapsulates the entire character as, in front of a blurred out backdrop of a twinkling cityscape (there are a lot of beautiful shots of cityscapes in this film, suggesting distant promises of a better life) Vic begins to cry on the right side of frame, moving out of shot as we hear her sob. Then, still focused on that blurred backdrop, Vic walks back into shot, composed and determined before walking off to the left, off into her new life (I'd like to imagine as the eventual crime boss of one of the tougher Paris banlieues! Or at the very least the Nikita for the new millennium!).

[DarkImbecile]

Scott Tobias on Sciamma’s career

[senseabove]

This is an excellent summary. Incidentally, I was reading the first Famous Five book to my five-year-old son last night, and couldn't help but be reminded of Tomboy in its portrayal of George (who is so obviously represented as transgender – as opposed to merely being a girl who wants to do "boy" things – that I was astonished that this had never previously occurred to me or, it seems, many other readers who grew up with the books).

Of course, Tomboy carries some of that ambiguity too, and I'm not sure that Sciamma is necessarily trying to put a definitive label on Laure/Mikael, but this seems a very specific experience of growing up that hasn't been represented much in either literature or cinema – so it's interesting to see that quality shared by a) a 2010s "arthouse" film by one of the most respected contemporary European queer filmmakers and b) an extremely popular book written by perhaps the most white-bread, old-fashioned and conservative-beloved of all British children's authors.

Yes, I defaulted to using 'their' because the film keeps Laure/Mikael fairly opaque... We never really know how much of Laure/Mikael's actions are deliberate, exploratory, opportunistic, or just Laure/Mikael in over their head and trying to maintain the persona. It's also why it's so baffling that the subtitles didn't just use "Are you the new boy?" for that first introduction. While it would imply that some other kids have told Lisa they saw Laure/Mikael, by not making it clear that Lisa's question could be, at the very least, the featherweight that pushes Laure over the edge into saying their name is Mikael ("You're shy." "I'm not." "Then aren't you going to tell me your name?"), it shifts Laure/Mikael's motivation from a destabilizing discovery via Lisa's surprising assumption to a seemingly capricious decision to "transition" at that moment. I think the movie's clear enough to eventually get across that it's the former—as we watch Laure/Mikael discover and try to keep up with all the ways that gender is expressed beyond grammar, it's clear this isn't something they've been planning for and observing—but you kinda have to work back to how crucial it is that their actions are exploratory and tentative. It's why that shift between their comfort and ease in the opening shot plus the subsequent ones at home is so softly jarring when we see how they act on the sidelines of the soccer field.

The more I let it sit, the more fascinated I am that the movie is distinctly not so much a manifesto about gender strictures as it is a testament to the sadness of the near-impossibility of personal exploration and the automatic marginalization of gender variance.

In other notes, I was also surprised the French title is the English "Tomboy," which Sciamma addresses in this interview:

"I don’t know about the stigma in the english word. But in french tomboy is “garçon manqué”, which means “failed boy”. I don’t need to comment, you can see how bad it is. That’s why I used the english word even for the french title. Because “garçon manqué” is kind of an insult in french. I didn’t like the notion in failure in the french expression, because it is something you can be very successful at!"

[senseabove]

Mild spoilers for all of Sciamma's first four movies... TL;DR: go watch Tomboy and Girlhood while they're on the CC, whether or not you liked Portrait.

SpoilerShow

After my curious pre-Portrait viewing of Tomboy, I was... not let down by Portrait, but underwhelmed. I think Portrait is excellent, but I wouldn't say it's subtle—which is perfectly fine, just not what I was expecting after the incredible, delicate precision of Tomboy. And my expectations for Portrait were pretty astronomical after the chatter here and elsewhere and the high of Tomboy. I can't wait to see it again so I can, I hope, be more considerate of its own merits, but at the moment, having just finished Girlhood, I'd be hard pressed to say I expect it's even feasible for Portrait to outrank Sciamma's two prior movies. Water Lilies is a fine debut with some amusing and some perspicacious moments and rough drafts of the themes her later movies will handle, but Sciamma had yet to discover the just stupendously masterful control of bodies in social space that Tomboy and Girlhood are lousy with. (Does she remind me of Cukor in that it's not distinct visual style but distinct sensibility? Am I exaggerating that for having watched a few Cukors lately and always trying to figure out what makes Cukor Cukor when he does work well?) And having now seen and admired that control in Girlhood and Tomboy, with Portrait between them, I wonder if Portrait's insularity is one of the reasons I feel it's the lesser in this first go-round. The mutual sympathy in the relationships in Portrait, their intimacy and care, has less of a(n initial) thrill than the constantly evolving precarity of Tomboy and Girlhood. Once the relationship in Portrait is established, the development doesn't have the urgency that the slinky-esque situations of Family->Neighborhood Gang->Lisa->Mother or that Lady->Djibril->Ismael->Abou->Monica have. Portrait is also missing those crucial scenes of potentially antagonistic in-group/out-group settings, such as Tomboy's idle chatter and sports or Girlhood's fights and competitions—the closest it has is the thrilling, unexpected pinnacle of the titular scene (or what could be one of the two possible titular scenes, I guess, since as we discussed elsewhere, the title is ambiguous about whether the portrait itself or the lady portrayed is on fire). Which isn't to say Tomboy or Girlhood don't have their own sense of acute directnesss, but it feels like an acuteness the character is facing and thus we're experiencing through them, like when Mikael/Laure has to confess or Ismael confronts Marieme/Vic about her appearance, rather than a directness in the narrative's intentions toward the audience, as with Portrait's abortion plot.

[therewillbeblus]

SpoilerShow

The mutual sympathy in the relationships in Portrait, their intimacy and care, has less of a(n initial) thrill than the constantly evolving precarity of Tomboy and Girlhood. Once the relationship in Portrait is established, the development doesn't have the urgency that the slinky-esque situations of Family->Neighborhood Gang->Lisa->Mother or that Lady->Djibril->Ismael->Abou->Monica have. Portrait is also missing those crucial scenes of potentially antagonistic in-group/out-group settings, such as Tomboy's idle chatter and sports or Girlhood's fights and competitions—the closest it has is the thrilling, unexpected pinnacle of the titular scene (or what could be one of the two possible titular scenes, I guess, since as we discussed elsewhere, the title is ambiguous about whether the portrait itself or the lady portrayed is on fire). Which isn't to say Tomboy or Girlhood don't have their own sense of acute directnesss, but it feels like an acuteness the character is facing and thus we're experiencing through them, like when Mikael/Laure has to confess or Ismael confronts Marieme/Vic about her appearance, rather than a directness in the narrative's intentions toward the audience, as with Portrait's abortion plot.

SpoilerShow

Portrait of a Lady on Fire definitely feels like the outlier among the three, but I'd say the "antagonistic" systems aren't missing from the narrative they're just missing from the screen. Héloïse is being deprived of agency, time, and authentic life by external forces in an involuntary life-sentence to marry a husband we don't see, but the ominous energy is as strong as any aggressively acute group dynamics in the other films only more enigmatic in its inescapability. I also feel like the relationship has nothing but urgency considering the brief timeline they are able to experience one another's company and energetic connection, and this alone is thrilling - the weight of time eliciting acute anxieties around an all-too-imminent permanent seal of fate that the characters must continuously pull back from, coping independently and with support of each other, in order to experience the moment, which is a lot like a relationship - using one's strengths to reciprocate the other's stressors with compassion. A lot of the "thrilling" aspects of Portrait aren't in the abrasive tangible conflicts of groups within the same milieu, but in invisible feelings of powerlessness from abstract concepts like fear, loss, disempowerment, hopelessness, fatalism, and finding ways to locate bouts of serenity, gratitude, and authentic connection amidst the oppression of unstoppable time counting down until these abstract feelings become acute physical realities. In my mind the abortion plot signifies a moment of how these women can detach from their own looming crises to be of assistance to another with empathy, similar to playing card games, rather than any direct narrative intention. It's also another example of that "antagonistic" conflict occurring with a significant part (the man who contributed to this pregnancy "problem") completely off screen, but still conflict nonetheless- just without a tangible person to see and project our feelings onto. It becomes a synonymous crisis to Héloïse's on a smaller scale, initiating an imprisonment of circumstance with no present outlet to expel or share emotional turmoil onto the oppressive systems - leaving it up to the women to form camaraderie and support.

[senseabove]

I guess the implicitness of that off-screen conflict had less of an impact on my first go-round, and much of what was on screen—abortion, documenting women's lives throughout history, female community—felt like choir preaching, even if I've got my robe on and am sympathetic. In contrast, both Tomboy and Girlhood felt akin to something like The Florida Project in how they manage to almost passively incorporate conflicts from the real world that cannot be anything but political, by keeping those conflicts on the margins of the narrative while their relevance to their lead characters' choices is nevertheless apparent. We spend lots of time in Laure/Mikael's and Marieme/Vic's homes, and their home life is obviously background to their choices—interestingly diametric as each is, one of exploration made from relative comfort, one of desperation and need—but Sciamma's presentation of it is not as a causative. We're allowed to experience the personal necessity of those choices, not have it explained to us. Whereas Portrait gives us, for example, multiple conversations between Marianne and Heloise comparing their relative (lack of) freedom between each other and to men. I guess I like the mixture of candor with a lack of didacticism in Girlhood and Tomboy... Those invisible feelings you mention are more interesting when they remain invisible, rather than being outlined.

Which, again, is not to slag off Portrait. I'm eager see it again, and the fire scene will likely—especially given how the year's going—be one of the most memorable theatrical moments of the year for me. But it's one I've been having to feel my way through my enthusiasm for in retrospect, unlike Sciamma's two preceding movies that I watched on either side of it, for which my enthusiasm is whole and immediate.

[therewillbeblus]

I agree with your takes on both of those earlier films bearing a keen interest in the humanity that cuts through almost magnetic edges of didacticism like Baker, though I didn't think Portrait was didactic in the least, even less than those other films were (which, again, is inevitable based on their construction of people-in-environment scenarios). I felt like Sciamma used the omissions in her milieu to signify enigmas and yet create such a surging vacuum of performance that these ideas immediately reflected back to the characters' emotions rather than elicit any socio-political content or messages. For me it was pure emotion, and I felt she dodged the defaults into politics much better than ever before, in her own career or for the expectations of a period romance (which is also essentially inescapable!) I wonder if I'll have the same feelings on a second watch, but honestly the way Sciamma pulled off this seemingly impossible feat to evoke universal ineffable social-emotional truths on the complex experience of love without distraction is the reason I loved the film so much, whereas if I had read it as didactic I would have almost certainly had a similar reaction to yours.

[Rupert Pupkin]

about Water lilies aka "La naissance des pieuvres" in the Criterion bonus of "Portrait d'une jeune fille en feu" there are some excerpts (in real HD and it looks damned good! better than the WEB 1080 release) of Adèle Haenel first movie with Céline Sciamma.
In the end of this Criterion documentary there are the credits of the owner (?) of the movie : Kino apparently.
Can we hope a Kino US release of "Water Lilies" or could Criterion release this great first feature ?

[fdm]

The three films on Criterion Channel (Water Lilies, Tomboy, Girlhood) are going away at the end of this month. Real HD (video) for all of them.

[Rupert Pupkin]

The three films on Criterion Channel (Water Lilies, Tomboy, Girlhood) are going away at the end of this month. Real HD (video) for all of them.

yes of course the WEB 1080 is "real HD" but the video excerpts of "Water Lilies" used in the Céline Sciamma interview in Criterion Blu-Ray of "Portrait de la jeune fille en feu aka Portrait Of A Lady On Fire" look even better with more HD details and fine grain; which makes me really hope for a Criterion release.

[Calvin]

Korean label Plain Archive have just announced a Blu-Ray box set containing Tomboy, Girlhood, and what will be the world Blu-Ray premiere of Water Lilies.

[soundchaser]

If it's a port of their DVD set of the same films, it may only have Korean subtitles.

[DarkImbecile]

"Céline Sciamma’s Quest for a New, Feminist Grammar of Cinema", Elif Batuman, The New Yorker

From a very interesting section on how she views her pre-Portrait films:

Talking about Girlhood now, Sciamma is categorically undefensive: “For me, it’s really simple. If people you consider political allies are telling you, ‘This is not helping the revolution. This is even slowing the revolution,’ then they’re right. That’s it.” She has often spoken of a sense of living in a larger world, with a larger future, than she had imagined for herself. (“It’s such a relief that we can change,” she said at one point.) In the past, she had thought of herself as a “reformist,” not a revolutionary. That was her background: “neurotic political optimism on one side, and strong pessimism on the other.” (The optimism was on the immigrant side.) I recognized both emotions from my own interior life: the optimism about the arc of history, and the pessimism about collective action.

“It’s how we were collaborating,” Sciamma told me. “My first three films are collaborating with cinema and patriarchy.”

Sciamma’s second film, Tomboy, contains a scene in which a male-identifying child is physically forced to wear a dress. It’s horrible to watch—it feels like torture. Sciamma said that it had also been horrible to shoot. She would never film a scene like that today. At the time, she thought she had to force herself, because she was still “playing by the book.” She was already “trying to disrupt the book,” but still within “the rules of ‘legitimate screenwriting.’ ”

[colinr0380]

That final comment is interesting in relation to Girlhood, as Vic in that film is pretty much forced to wear a dress for the first time when she is pushed into acting as the male gang's glamorous drug pushing go-between figure during the party scene. I would not have equated those scenes together before now.

[spectre]

I'm a huge fan of Sciamma and found the New Yorker article a fascinating insight into her artistic process, but must confess to not being so enthusiastic about her commitment to turning her back on conflict in films. No question that conflict for conflict's sake can be a huge cliché and a sign of by-the-book screenwriting – and I can even agree that that scene in Tomboy was a misstep, though not necessarily for the same reasons Sciamma has suggested here and elsewhere – but conflict is also a part of every human relationship, and I think you lose something when you choose not to allow your characters to rub one another the wrong way, or have different goals, or fail to communicate.

I feel like that aversion is already becoming somewhat evident in her filmmaking: for instance, I was talking to a friend about Petite maman the other day, and we both came to the conclusion that the weakest aspect of that film is the complete absence of conflict – or, indeed, differentiation – between the characters. Everyone, (possibly separating or separated?) parents included, is so unfailingly nice and understanding! And that's a pity, because the film's idea – of meeting one's parent at the same stage of life as you are at now and developing love and empathy for them as an equal and peer – is such a fascinating and radical premise. The daughter and mother-as-child end up seeming like two versions of the one person (and, indeed, that's reflected in the choice to cast identical twins), but surely the most interesting aspect of this premise is that you are not your parent: if you met them at the same age, you would see things you recognise in them and things you don't. You might have a very close friendship, but that's an entirely different thing from meeting your clone.

Even Portrait of a Lady on Fire, in hindsight, suffers from this somewhat in a way that very much seems a conscious choice: it is a film about, among other things, solidarity among women – including between romantic partners, who get to feel the highs of a brief love affair that can be melancholically idealised in memory without ever having to navigate all the dirty realities of fulfilled desire (Orpheus and Eurydice never have to argue over who's paying for the groceries this week). Such an emphasis on kindness and harmony (or, specifically, sisterhood) over tension and conflict can be a radical narrative approach when used judiciously. But I'm a bit dismayed to read Sciamma be so dismissive of her early (great) films, and can't help but feel that she may be limiting herself if she's not going to deviate from this path in future work.

[Mr Sausage]

Portrait of a Lady on Fire rests entirely on implicit conflict, tho', doesn't it? There's a constant push and pull between the three women's desires and the social expectations that surround them, be it who they ought to love or marry, or whether they ought to be pregnant or not. There's always some tension between what they're drawn to and what they're expected to be doing. Just the first act, where Marianne is surreptitiously observing and painting Héloïse, is traditional narrative conflict, even if it doesn't devolve into an emotional argument. Or the two women's argument over the first painting, which is implicitly an argument over their feelings for each other. Another classical bit of drama. Just the first scene alone, where Marianne has to risk her life for her painting supplies to the evident disinterest of the sailors hints at the essential conflict at the heart of her story.

But, yeah, you're not alone in fearing that Sciamma's political and ideological commitments are going to get in the way of her artistic ones.

[Calvin]

If it's a port of their DVD set of the same films, it may only have Korean subtitles.

Surprisingly, it will have English subtitles for the features and is now up for pre-order