Ways of seeing in the films of Céline Sciamma
by Emily Garbutt
Céline Sciamma’s feature films Tomboy, Water Lilies and Portrait of a Lady on Fire each capture a different stage of life – childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Sciamma has referred to the latter as “a manifesto about the female gaze”, but the former two films serve as an equally fascinating insight into the politics of looking.
The characters’ ways of seeing are different in each of these films, as they are in each of these stages of life. Tomboy and Water Lilies take place in suburban present day France, while Portrait of a Lady on Fire is set against the rugged backdrop of an isolated island in eighteenth-century Brittany. Ultimately, the ways of seeing in these films are always bound up in the different power structures and social pressures of their time period.
In Tomboy, 10-year-old Laure (Zoé Héran) moves to a new area with her family in the last few weeks of summer. Starting over somewhere different, she reinvents herself to the local kids as Mickäel, a boy. The act of watching functions as a way of learning and fitting in for Laure – she is constantly conscious of how she is perceived by others. She often stays on the sidelines, watching, like the first time she joins the others kids playing football. “I like to watch,” she tells her friend Lisa. The next day, Laure joins in, confident that she has observed enough to fit in.
When her mother gives her a key for their apartment on a pink cord, Laure replaces it with a white shoelace. This comes from a pair of trainers with pink accents; it is obvious that they are never worn. Watching and learning is how Laure tries to secure her social capital, the closest thing children have to hierarchies of power amongst themselves.
The mirror is a tool that helps her achieve this goal – mirrors are a symbol of possibility for Laure. She spends a lot of time looking in the bathroom mirror, but not due to vanity – she is observing herself and how others will perceive Mickäel. Before a trip to swim in the lake, Laure makes herself something out of playdough to put inside her pants to maintain the appearance of maleness. She cuts up her swimsuit to make a pair of swimming trunks and tests it out in the mirror. Through the mirror, Laure sees what could be, and this in turn allows her to make these possibilities real.
Meanwhile, Water Lilies transports the viewer to the tumultuous terrain of being a teenager: Marie (Pauline Acquart) becomes obsessed with the captain of her local pool’s synchronised swimming team, Floriane (Adèle Haenel).
Like Laure, Marie and her friend Anne (Louise Blachère) are also restrictively self-consciousness. However, their adolescence further complicates this with feelings of desire. For example, after the film’s opening swimming competition, Anne waits for everyone to leave the changing rooms before she gets dressed – she lies to her teammate and says she is waiting for her swimsuit to dry and when Marie, waiting outside, asks what took her so long she says she had to wait to use the hairdryer. While she is hurriedly changing, Floriane’s boyfriend François walks into the changing room and sees her naked. This is what begins her infatuation with him. In a later scene, Anne stands naked in the empty changing room, facing the door, waiting for François to come in again. She is desperate to be seen, but he doesn’t appear.
Much of the looking that occurs in the film is when Marie and Anne watch those who they desire – Floriane and François, respectively. Marie waits for Floriane outside the swimming pool at the beginning of the film. “What do you want?” Floriane asks.“I want to watch,” Marie replies. Later in the film, when she believes Floriane and François are having sex, Marie sits outside on the pavement, watching Floriane’s bedroom window. Both girls are passive, conscious of others’ eyes on them, but they are also the ones actively looking.
In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), a painter, employed to paint a wedding portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) without her knowledge. The relationship between the two women grows, tentatively, and then blossoms.
Marianne must observe Héloïse to paint her from memory. She observes her, taking in all the small details like the curve of her earlobes in stolen glances so she can paint her in private. Marianne picks up on all Héloïse’s emotional tells: “Forgive me,” she says. “I’d hate to be in your place.” “We’re in the same place. Exactly the same place,” Héloïse replies. “If you look at me, who do I look at?” Sciamma inverts the usual power dynamics associated with looking – usually, as John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing, “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Sciamma disrupts this dichotomy by making both painter and subject female.
Héloïse’s only way of asserting power is to take control of how she is seen by others. Another – male – artist was commissioned to paint Héloïse’s wedding portrait and failed. Héloïse refuses the marriage and therefore will not be painted. Her older sister killed herself when she was in the same position – her fate is now passed onto Héloïse, and this refusal for her likeness to be reproduced is the only act of rebellion available to her. Héloïse’s impending marriage haunts the pair. Marianne admits that she would like to destroy the finished painting: “Through it, I give you to another.” “You blame me for what comes next,” Héloïse accuses. Although the act of painting is what brings Marianne and Héloïse together, it is also what will pull them apart – by painting her, Marianne turns Héloïse into an object of consumption, offering her up to the man who will marry her if he likes what he sees.
One evening, Héloïse is reading the Ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice – it is a story about looking, and about loss. When Orpheus’ wife Eurydice dies, he visits the god of the underworld Hades to see her. Hades says Eurydice can leave the underworld with Orpheus on one condition: that he doesn’t turn around to look at her until they reach the human world. If he does look, he will lose her forever. “He’s madly in love. He can’t resist,” says Héloïse. “He could resist,” Marianne counters. “His reasons aren’t serious. Perhaps he makes a choice… He chooses the memory of her. That’s why he turns. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s.” By indulging in a relationship that cannot last, Marianne has made a similar choice. By acting on her feelings for Héloïse, she automatically chooses the memory of her.
Sciamma’s films capture the politics of looking and power from childhood through to adulthood. In the words of Berger, the protagonists are “almost continually accompanied” by the image of themselves. While Portrait of a Lady on Fire may be a “manifesto”, with Tomboy and Water Lilies these three films are a skilfully crafted portfolio of the female gaze.
