With rave reviews at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Neon has just released the trailer to Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Starring Adéle Haenel and Noémie Merlant, Sciamma’s film won both the Best Screenplay and Queer Palm at Cannes, making Sciamma the first woman to win the latter.
Coming off her two previous acclaimed films, 2011’s Tomboy and 2014’s Girlhood, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is set in France during the 18th century and follows the love story of a young painter who is commissioned to paint a wedding portrait unbeknownst to the bride-to-be.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Brittany, France, 1760. Marianne, a painter, is commissioned to do the wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young lady who has just left the convent. Héloïse is a reluctant bride to be and Marianne must paint her without her knowing. She observes her by day and secretly paints her at night. Intimacy and attraction grow between the two women as they share Héloïse’s first and last moments of freedom, all whilst Marianne paints the portrait that will end it all.
Our own Leonardo Goi was enraptured by the film at Cannes writing, in his review, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a film of incandescent scenes and staggering wonder… Its beauty resides, like few other films, in its timelessness. This is a period piece that chronicles a week in the lives of two 18th century women and still feel eerily present, because the story it narrates, and the myths it harkens back to, have always been there.”
See the trailer and poster below.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire opens on December 6.