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ESSAYS

April 5th, 2020

Céline Sciamma and the Art of Absence

I tend to live my life inside a revolving door of artistic obsessions. It's not intentional - it's just that, occasionally, I imprint on a TV show like a lil art-starved duckling, and suddenly I'm stuck waddling behind Killing Eve for a year and a half pining for dark murder comedy. Or, sometimes it's a live-play Dungeons & Dragons web series. Sometimes it's literally just Fiona Apple, again. These things happen.

But lately, in part due to an uptick in my movie consumption, in part because she has literally changed how I process story, the subject of my wide-eyed, inspired affection is French screenwriter and director Céline Sciamma.

For those not tracking my Wikipedia usage or my Fandango account, you may know Sciamma's fourth film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which came out in the U.S. a couple months ago after winning Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival. Starring Adèle Haenel (with whom Sciamma has had a long friendship and previous relationship) and Noémie Merlant, the movie is a slow-burn romance in 18th century France between an isolated aristocrat due to be married to her late sister's suitor, and the artist commissioned to paint her wedding portrait. If the suitor likes the portrait, he will agree to the marriage - only, Haenel's character is understandably resistant, and refuses to be painted. Merlant, as the artist, must paint her in secret. (Tension! Meaningful looks! Stealth art!)

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The resulting two hours consist of two of the best acting performances of the year, award-winning (literally) cinematography, and a love story that has as much meaning in the echo as it does in the moment. But more than that - at least for me, and now, I guess, for you - it introduces you to the artistic theses of its director.

Céline Sciamma has directed four films, all of which she also wrote:
 
  • 2007's Water Lilies, a coming-of-age story about three adolescent girls against the backdrop of sexual desire, orientation, and expression (in which Haenel also stars);
  • 2011's Tomboy, a coming-of-age story about a young child assigned female at birth who spends the summer in a new neighborhood identifying as a boy;
  • 2014's Girlhood, a coming-of-age story about a young Black woman growing up and searching for community in the Parisian suburbs (these three films form an unofficial trilogy of adolescent stories);
  • and 2019's Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

And I could write a whole essay on Portrait, only that would feel incomplete - because, while Portrait truly feels like a masterpiece, it realizes with such catharsis a perspective that Sciamma has been defining since her first film.

As a writer and as a director, Sciamma's work is inclusive as much as it's political, radical. She builds worlds for her characters that let them breathe. She removes the Defaults (white people, men, adults, depending) from the narrative without defining the remaining characters by the Defaults' absence. She lets characters fail and question and, often, succeed, of their own merit. She gives them space.

Sciamma's films are defined, at least for me, by that space. In literal terms, we could look at her characters' environments; the physical distance (or lack thereof) between characters; the overall lack of dialog; in Portrait, how she legislates performance down to the number of footsteps an actor should take, down to the inhale and exhale. There is a choreography. There is a rhythm, even if there is no music. There is room.
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And for how formally Sciamma works - her films are stylized, meticulously crafted as opposed to attempts at a simulated reality - you might expect the films themselves to lack warmth. To feel more arthouse and experimental than earnest and authentic. But the opposite is the case. The analytical elements of her work (of which there are many; she is delightfully dismissive of the idea that you must "capture the magic" in screenwriting rather than plan from the ground up) exist to support the emotion. To achieve depth, evoke something profound through construction. To enhance and justify and protect the desires of her characters.

It's that desire, Sciamma says, that forms the root of her writing - pragmatic production desires, aesthetic desires, political desires, and character desires. And here, voilà: the metaphorical space.

Already across her four directed projects, Sciamma's subjects are ones rarely given real estate on mainstream screens. And with each, because none of these conceits fall completely under that white, heterosexual, patriarchal Default in which we live - and because the (polemical, says Sciamma) storytelling we've been taught lives on conflict - the instinct is to set these kinds of stories against their wider world. Achieving their desires in spite of.

It's not particularly difficult to find examples of this kind of conflict, simply because it's embedded in both our cinema and our history. It's everything from the weaponized white supremacy in Get Out, to the existence of the Bury Your Gays trope, to every character in Wonder Woman feeling the need to tell Gal Gadot she's either a) hot, or b) crazy. (I have feelings.)

Sciamma, on the other hand, rejects the conceit that the core of her story is this restrictive, structural conflict. The concept that, to paraphrase Sciamma, the obstacles to a character's desire are more interesting than the desire itself. Instead of centering the existential obstacles in a character's life, Sciamma centers the character, and so changes the nature of the conflict. What new tensions arise when you pare a story down to its characters' deepest emotions, to their realization? When you replace the supremacy of conflict with that of desire?

As part of the BAFTA's 2019 Screenwriters' Lecture Series (a video I absolutely couldn't recommend more, spoilers for Portrait), Sciamma describes this decision as it applies to Portrait of a Lady on Fire:
"So technically, even though Portrait can be pitched as an impossible love story, it is not written that way. It only tells about their possible love. Their experience of it. It’s not about their relationship facing the world, and the rules, it’s about the two of them facing each other. [...] So I decided not to tell about the obstacles, the enemies, the traps, men. Leave the impossibility out of the room, because it will be waiting for them anyway when they get out."
Maybe this concept isn't so revolutionary, big picture, as it feels to me; and yet, in a world built on the suppression of certain groups, the fulfillment of desire becomes a radical act. Here is a movie about two women falling in love that is almost entirely devoid of the constraints of hierarchy; of patriarchy; of inequality. If you've seen the film, you know these things are still present (in a looming, heartbreaking way), but they're hardly the focus. They only regain our attention once the characters "leave the room."

The same can be said about Sciamma's other films. Water Lilies is a story of self-discovery and the pressures of female adolescence told unconditionally within the female adolescent perspective. The protagonist of Tomboy spends most of their journey surrounded by other children - peers - rather than the prescriptive authority of adults. Girlhood seems to me a happy medium between the other two, investigating pressures on Black female adolescence and adulthood without its protagonist relinquishing ownership of her narrative as a Black, female one. In every case, Sciamma has built spaces that characters can inhabit fully, can explore fully - room for mistakes and discomfort and the investigation of desire. We know that real-world prejudices and restrictions exist, but they do not dominate here. These spaces are not defined by the Absence of Men; by the Absence of White People; by the Absence of Adults. The worlds belong wholly to the desires of their characters.

In that same BAFTA lecture, Sciamma articulates this desire-based approach as one thesis:
"Women have been objectified by fiction and by the patriarchal lore throughout history, so giving them back their subject status, their subjectivity, is giving them back their desires. Heroines don’t have the same opportunities as heroes. [...] Fiction is not a safe space for female characters. They don’t get rid of oppression there. You can’t artificially free women in fiction. So if you want to tell their stories, it’s not about where they live because they rarely have the opportunity to live fully - especially in a period piece (which is practical). It’s about what they experience.

Portrait only looks and tells about its characters’ desires, because they don’t have the freedom to project themselves. So it’s about how their desire will be fulfilled for a moment. Desire is female’s opportunity for fiction."
If you've talked to me about politics or storytelling for any length of time, you can probably see why this approach means so much to me. Because this is what I'm looking for - as a writer, as a woman, as a human being who relies on art. How do you tell stories in ways that liberate their subjects? How do you challenge social systems that are not only near-universal, but baked into your own thinking in ways you might not even realize? Here I am, hoping (like everyone else) to see myself in art in a way that is full, respectful, meaningful. And here is Céline saying, with good reason, Fiction is not a safe space for female characters. So... do you craft a new space? Do you devote yourself, above all, to centering your characters?

Part of what's so frustrating to me about these questions is not that they are difficult to answer - though they are, especially when it comes to effectively doing so in art. The real twist of the knife is how easily we can answer worse questions. Ask us about conflict. Ask us about injustice, or what's missing. Those answers are miles and centuries long; those answers are Oscar winners and newspaper headlines and wars and lived experiences, clearer concepts than what do I want and why do I want it. We know more what it looks like to be traumatized than what it looks like to be free.

Perhaps because of how much our collective history is defined by this conflict, the concept of thinking beyond it can be... what, daunting? Intangible? We carry this inherent trauma with us simply by existing. It's not surprising that it dominates our stories, too.

Of course, this isn't to say that any of these approaches is superior to the other - it's nuanced, not binary. Mad Max: Fury Road doesn't offer safety to any of its characters, and that's what gives it teeth. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open offers nothing but respect to its two indigenous female leads, who also spend the entire film confronting structural conflicts past, present, and future. In my own writing, I've either given my characters tools to face this kind of conflict or I've built a fantastical environment, exchanging real-world prejudice for less insidious obstacles. There is a vast middle ground between centering global conflict and centering local desire.

But watching Portrait in theaters (we don't have to say how many times) felt revolutionary because I had never seen a film that made room for me like that before. That posed a question about desire instead of conflict, and answered it so fully. That told a story about women that truly centered them - not as objects, not as vehicles to another subject, not even as subjects valiantly challenging a subjugating status quo. (Birds of Prey absolutely kicked comic book ass with this last one, by the way.) It's in the script. It's in the cinematography. It's in the fact that the women's desires are not only affirmed, valued: they are the story.

(The triply-good news: Sciamma pulls this magic in all of her films.)

I love Sciamma's work because it is inclusive. I love it because it is unequivocally, defiantly respectful. It grants a safety to its subjects that the real world does not - room to desire, to pursue desire, that might not be achieved with any permanence, but is surely not punished on principle. It is art that frees at the individual level, that is incredibly local yet also contains space for you as a viewer. Your desires, your stories. That Sciamma herself seems a sharply funny, kind, humble and outspoken human being is not surprising, given how much those qualities permeate her work. (Really, I could have saved us all a lot of time if I just named this essay 'We Stan a Considerate Queen,' but here we are.)

So, all hail Céline Sciamma: radical breaker-of-hearts, lesbian protector of ambiguous adolescent emotions, Queen of Considerate Art; may the art-makers among us learn from her lead. And really, if we think about it, maybe the key to her casual radicalism is simpler than it seems.

Be political. Be kind. Make room.


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