Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019)

Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Cast: Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luàna Bajrami, Valeria Golino, Christel Baras, Armande Boulanger, Guy Delamarche, Clément Bouyssou. Screenplay: Céline Sciamma. Cinematography: Claire Mathon. Production design: Thomas Grézaud. Film editing: Julien Lacheray. Music: Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, Arthur Simonini.

It isn't just the title of Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire that made me think of Henry James. It's the film's delicate and subtle treatment of a Jamesean theme, the intersection of consciousnesses, and the fact that Sciamma, as James did in some of his stories, uses an artist as a vehicle for developing the theme. I also found the film something of a revelation of Sciamma's great talent after watching two of her previous films, Water Lilies (2007) and Girlhood (2014). The contemporary setting of those films necessitated a kind of documentary realism that is set aside for Portrait of a Lady on Fire, with its 18th-century setting and more rigid moral codes serving as limitations on its characters, defining their roles and allowing us to confront their responses to the limitation with clarity. It's also fascinating, I think, to compare Sciamma's film with Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013), a film heavily defined by the male gaze, while Sciamma's view of the lesbian relationship of her characters, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), is an exploration of female "looking." There are extraordinary moments that perhaps only a woman might have imagined, or imaged, throughout the film: The abortion that takes place with the maid Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) lying across the bed while a baby plays with her face; the festival that seems to be made up mostly of women, at which Héloïse's dress catches fire; Marianne leaping from the boat to rescue her paints and canvases; Marianne propping a mirror against the nude Héloïse's mons veneris so she can sketch a self-portrait on page 28 (the page number will become significant later in the film) of Héloïse's copy of Ovid, where the story of Opheus and Eurydice is told. Reviewers of the film reached a little too often and too eagerly for the word "masterpiece," an epithet that can only be applied by time, but it's certainly an extraordinary film, made so by fine performances, and by Claire Mathon's cinematography and Dorothée Guiraud's costumes, which often evoke the paintings of Chardin.

Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019)

Cast: Mame Bineta Sane, Amadou Mbow, Traore, Nicole Sougou, Aminata Kane, Coumba Dieng, Ibrahim Mbaye, Diankou Sembene, Abdou Balde, Babacar Sylla. Screenplay: Mati Diop, Olivier Demangel. Cinematography: Claire Mathon. Art direction: Yves Capell (concept artist), Laura Bücher (assistant art director). Film editing: Aël Dallier Vega. Music: Fatima Al Qadiri.

Atlantics is a fascinating mixture of social commentary about contemporary Senegal and a ghost story with touches of vampire lore. It centers on a love story: Ada (Mame Bineta Sane) loves Souleiman (Traore) but is being forced to marry the wealthy Omar (Babacar Sylla). Souleiman is a construction worker on a huge project: a towering building that looms improbably (and in fact digitally) over the low-rising city of Dakar. He and his co-workers are fighting for the back pay that is owed them, and when that is once again denied, they decide to set sail for Spain in search of better work. When they have been gone for a while, Ada reluctantly gives in to the pressure to marry Omar, and after the wedding shows her friends through her new home. The young women particularly admire the fancy white marriage bed, but while they're out of the room the bed catches fire. A young detective named Issa (Amadou Mbow) is called in to investigate the suspected case of arson, and because there have been rumors that Souleiman has returned to Dakar, he becomes the chief suspect and Ada is grilled by Issa on whether she has seen him. Meanwhile, several of Ada's friends come down with a mysterious illness -- as does Issa, who begins feeling its symptoms at sunset. When Western medicine fails, shamans and imams are called in to try to cure the young women, but the illness persists. This is the start of the film's striking shift into fantasy, with a romantic resolution that doesn't vitiate but rather reinforces writer-director Mati Diop's view of the post-colonial world.