In the Flesh: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Patreon)

From the first moment they form, our memories are dying. Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire deals with the illusory permanence of art and the fleeting nature of love and passion, its minimalist restraint and intense intimacy surprisingly well-suited to one another.   It dives into the practice of art without melodrama, devoting large slices of its running time to quiet shots of portraitist Marianne painting the upper-class Heloise, a former nun withdrawn from her convent after her sister's suicide. Marianne sketches and paints Heloise close to a dozen times over the course of the film, but there is no dramatic camera trickery or soaring romantic music to accompany her practice. Instead its intimacy resides in stillness and in observation.

Late in the film as the two women lie together after sex, Marianne sketching Heloise, Heloise expresses sadness that someday her image will be what Marianne imagines when recalling her. She then asks for an image of Marianne, a quiet acknowledgement that in spite of memory's bitter incompleteness there is no other place where we can hold our love for one another. Marianne draws herself from a reflection in a mirror placed over Heloise's vulva, its surface tilting gently with the other woman's every breath. It's a beautiful illustration of the simultaneous closeness and distance of encompassing one's self or one's beloved in an image, of the ardent, doomed attempts to cross the boundary between thought and flesh which make up a love affair.

Much of Portrait is preoccupied with observing scenes of painful intimacy. In one, a curious baby touches a young domestic servant's face as a midwife gives her an abortion, the full breadth and depth of the lives of women caught up without irony or crass moralizing into a single cohesive image. Marianne and Heloise watch from the corner of the room, Heloise cautioning Marianne not to look away in spite of her discomfort. In another, several years after their separation and the end of their affair, Marianne, unobserved, watches Heloise attend a performance of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, a piece from which Marianne once played for her, and drinks in the other woman's tearful joy. 

Sciamma's movie is uniquely lesbian in its visual and emotional sensibilities, living entirely in the world of women and paying every aspect of that world close and specific attention. From the tender motion of a finger curled into a lover's sweating armpit, the alien hiss of fire eating through the hem of a green dress, and the artless haste of a woman turning away from her beloved when she can no longer bear to look at her it creates a single cohesive whole as thoughtful and naturalistic as its sets, a glimpse of a world that lives only in its denizens, a world eternally hidden, papered over, and remade in secret.