“Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” April 6

Thursday, April 6, 6:30 p.m.

Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second Street, Davenport IA

A Golden Globe nominee for Best Foreign Language Film that was also named the 30th greatest film of all time in the 2022 Sight & Sound critics’ poll, Céline Sciamma's French romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire will enjoy a Figge Art Museum screening on April 6 in conjunction with the exhibition Sporting Fashion: Outdoor Girls 1800 to 1960, the Davenport venue's latest movie series highlighting award-winning, groundbreaking feature films that celebrate the cinematic achievements of women.

With its dramatic tale opening in 1760 France, Portrait of a Lady's Marianne is commissioned to paint the wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young woman who has just left the convent. Because she is a reluctant bride-to-be, Marianne arrives under the guise of companionship, observing Héloïse by day and secretly painting her by firelight at night. As the two women orbit each other, however, attraction and intimacy grow as they share Héloïse's first moments of freedom. Héloïse's portrait soon becomes a collaborative act of, and testament to, their love, and in advance of its global release in 2019, writer/director Sciamma's French-language movie won the Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, becoming the first film directed by a woman to win the award, and also received the citation for Best Screenplay.

Released in France in September of 2019 and in the United States as a limited release in December before its wide release the following February, Sciamma's work was the subject of broad acclaim. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film currently has an approval rating of 98 percent, with the Web site's critical consensus reading: "A singularly rich period piece, Portrait of a Lady on Fire finds stirring, thought-provoking drama within a powerfully acted romance." The New York Times wrote that the historical romance was a "subtle and thrilling love story, at once unsentimental in its realistic assessment of women's circumstances," describing the unfolding of Marianne and Héloïse's relationship as "less a chronicle of forbidden desire than an examination of how desire works." The Guardian gave the film five stars and called it "an intellectually erotic study of power and passion in which observed becomes observer, authored becomes author, returning time and again to a central question: 'If you look at me, who do I look at?'" Variety magazine, meanwhile, stated, "Though this gorgeous, slow-burn lesbian romance works strongly enough on a surface level, one can hardly ignore the fact, as true then as it is now, that the world looks different when seen through a woman's eyes."

Portrait of a Lady on Fire will be presented in the John Deere Auditorium on April 6, admission to the 6:30 p.m. screening is free, and more information is available by calling (563)326-7804 and visiting FiggeArtMuseum.org.