Céline Sciamma’s Gaze

By Jack Wilson

Since I saw the magnificent Portrait of a Lady on Fire in a crowded sweaty screen back in December it hasn’t left my mind. It moved and impressed me in equal measure, but what I found stuck with me the most over the months before I could see it again were the finer details of it; the looks, the glances, the expressions. It was only when turning to Céline Sciamma’s back catalogue of features that I realised these soft intricacies are what to me define her as a filmmaker. More specifically, there is such a unique quality to her films that I can only think to ascribe to her directorial gaze, and the gazes of her characters both to the camera and to the world around them.

It can be seen in her debut film, Water Lilies, through how she uses the protagonist’s quiet, almost voyeuristic gaze, averting her eyes when seen, as her main tool in evoking the perspective of this young girl. Through this skill she is able to immediately place the viewer in her protagonist’s body, not through verbal expressions of emotion, but by simply reminding the viewer of the power of a look. It is clear Sciamma really believes in this power, going so far as to verbalise it in Girlhood, when a character actually tells the protagonist to “lower your eyes” as a direct way of making her feel powerless.

What I love about Sciamma’s films is how clear her affection is for her characters, and her attention to their expressions is what drives this affection. So much of her filmography is devoted somewhat to ideas of loneliness or alienation, and through her slow camera movement and occasional lack of dialogue, it feels like she is simply sitting next to her characters, comforting them while they go through their hurt or confusion about who they are. While the intimacy and affection is still present in her writing alone in My Life as a Courgette, to me it's this directorial linger that is key to capturing the nuances of expression that give away so much of her characters. In Tomboy, almost all of the film is spent closely with her main character, and it really feels as if Sciamma is so eager not to miss a single expression or emotion that she doesn’t dare let her out of the camera’s sight.

I feel it is in her first three films (Water Lilies, Tomboy, Girlhood), or what she calls her “accidental trilogy of youth”, that her admiration for these young characters is most prominent. As Roger Ebert said, “movies are like a machine for generating empathy”, and never is this more true than with these three films. She is able to pass on her admiration and empathy to the audience so vividly through the way she looks at her characters, in a way that makes you feel total sympathy for them even if you have no personal experience of their situation. These three films to me have some of the same sensibilities as something like a recent Sean Baker film (Tangerine, The Florida Project), in that there always seems a complete lack of judgement from the filmmaker, and nothing but genuine fondness for their characters. The sparsity of the editing in Girlhood, for example, is Sciamma’s way of encouraging the viewer to take note of the complexity of the protagonist’s facial expressions, and remove snap judgements.

It seems fitting therefore that the potency of the gaze Sciamma’s developed in her earlier films should come to a romantic crescendo in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. The beauty of the film stems from Sciamma’s now perfectly controlled gaze over these characters, and the love story burns perfectly due to her cultured understanding and trust in how much power a glance can hold when it comes to romance. She isn’t afraid to embrace this aspect of the film, explaining that when it came to Noémie Merlant watching the actual artist on set before imitating her for filming, it wasn’t her hand movements she was focused on replicating, but her gaze and the way she looked at the model and the canvas. Sciamma also stated they chose to shoot the film in extremely high quality digital 7k because the relationship was “about the rush of blood” and she felt it important to see this visually. She also gifts this attention to detail to the two characters in the film, dedicating a sequence to a back and forth of them relaying small details they’ve observed about each other, such as, “when you’re troubled, you breathe through your mouth”. This scene encapsulates perfectly the power of a look that Sciamma believes in and the romance that she is able to find in a gaze.

It’s this knowledge of how telling a small look or expression can be that makes Portrait of a Lady on Fire a genuine masterpiece in my opinion, and it's her masterful control over a gaze that makes Céline Sciamma one of the finest filmmakers working today.