I haven’t lost my mind over Portrait of a Lady on Fire in a while, but I was luxuriating in the pure delight of this scene.
The way that this scene explicitly spells out–in the dialogue, in the framing–how each woman sees the other woman, that they have been observing one another so closely and attentively, with such keen interest, that they know each other’s small habits and tics.
The way Heloise asserts that, as a consequence of this mutual observation, she and Marianne actually occupy the same “place” as subjects of study in one another’s eyes. Marianne believes as the artist that she is in a privileged/guarded position to study Heloise, her artistic subject, but in the realm of sharing time and space, Heloise is just as much observer. Heloise has just as much agency, but also more self-awareness in the sense that she has known that she’s being observed–it was Marianne who had a false sense of security. The painter/model observational–power, creative?–hierarchy (or even dichotomy) was to some extent false.
The beauty of the scene is how literally Céline depicts the two women being in the “same place,” the way Marianne literally enters the frame that Heloise occupies in order to physically stand next to Heloise. Cinematically, in the image we see, Marianne has entered the space into which she’d been gazing; this was her line of sight as she stood behind the canvas, this was the “place” in which she had put (and confined) Heloise.
Then Marianne intellectually enters Heloise’s gaze by following Heloise’s line of sight and comprehending what Heloise herself had been seeing all this time. As an audience, we are being shown that Heloise and Marianne “see” one another, but the way Marianne must come to this understanding is that she must see as Heloise sees, literally and figuratively. From Heloise’s position posing in the room, but also through Heloise’s thoughts, how she observes and what.
It’s so seemingly simple but the enormity of the revelation (of realizing her state of exposure this entire time)–and the tension (in which lurks a different revelation, one of attraction)–forces Marianne to flee the frame, i.e. Heloise’s frame, to try to disengage from this space, which then pushes in on Heloise, making her presence fill the frame as the scales of relative power between the two women find a new equilibrium. And the final shot we get is us, the audience, now entering Heloise’s gaze in a reverse shot in order to see the shaken, vulnerable, unsteady Marianne, almost a full body shot that makes Marianne appear smaller in contrast to how Heloise dominated the space of her frame in the preceding shot.
The traditional framing of the two women up to this point–Heloise (as model) in wider shots, Marianne (as painter) in close ups–is reversed. Thus we see and feel the power in Heloise’s position in this rearrangement and re-balancing. Now the flirting between them can really begin in earnest with the full acknowledgement of both parties of observing and being observed and how those positions are equal(ly distributed).
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