Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2020)

Media I Have Consumed > Movies

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Director: Céline Sciamma
(French film)

I liked this a lot! Even gave it a heart on Letterboxd.

A lovely premise+story. Full of emotion; depiction of artistic vision; sensuality; echoes of mythology. A likely candidate for a rewatch (rare for me). Good writing and cinematography and direction.

Bits of it also drive some inspiration to draw+paint, play piano, and like most good indie films I see these days, it also inspires me to write (and contemplate what writing/directing for film might be like).

The road to this film

Probably four or five years ago, I heard of this movie in the context of it relating to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth (subject of Hadestown, my favorite musical). I was interested in watching this film, but never got around to it until now. Today was also the day that the Hadestown theatrical trailer was released (not much of a meaningful coincidence because Hadestown is generally always somewhere in my field consciousness)[1].

Though my watching this film was in the back of my mind as an inevitability, a specific sequence led me to watch it when I did. The sequence starts with Pools (2025), which I watched on January 1st of this year, which funnily enough was brought to my attention by an Instagram[2] ad. I enjoyed Pools enough that a couple weeks ago, I asked ChatGPT to recommend me similar movies[3] -- this led me to watch the movie Water Lilies (2007), a coming of age film about girl swimmers -- I like this a lot, too, enough to be curious and look up who the director was:
Céline Sciamma. What else did Sciamma make? I was surprised to see: Portrait of a Lady on Fire -- instantly reminding me of my intention to watch it, and also making me quite sure I would watch it soon. And then, today, deciding to watch a movie, and deciding it was time for this.[4]

I feel a slight cringe at disclosing that ChatGPT was used to help get me to this movie. Yet how can I be ashamed given the wholly positive outcome? I say something similar to what I mentioned in this Indie Hackers podcast note: "I'm using [ChatGPT] to make a broad search for real human content, but leveraging natural language and a large-scoping conversation to drive that search." This also is evoking for me something I heard on Episode 1087 of the SGU podcast which I listened to today -- the concept of the "genetic fallacy", which says that you can dismiss an argument or piece of evidence due to its origin. Similarly, even though I got a movie recommendation from ChatGPT, I can judge and appreciate the movie separately from that source. Its worth is self-contained, regardless of where it came from.[5]

  1. though, there is some poetry in me watching a film relating to hadestown on the day that a hadestown film is in sharp focus. ↩︎

  2. one of the only platforms I can't black ads on... let this not be a lesson for me to watch more ads, though. I do kind of love that most of the ads I see on Instagram are for film and theater. It's kind of excellent. ↩︎

  3. "Suggest me more movies like Pools (2025) but from at least 5 years ago. Attribute specifc similar characteristics" --> "More but more obscure" ↩︎

  4. side note: the Lady actress was also one of the two protagonists of Water Lilies. ↩︎

  5. (Though, it does still feel appropriate and relevant to discuss its origin, which is why I have done so here, and I feel that it does add something to the conversation about AI usage, and how one discovers media, and how similar media is connected, and how interest in something can be predicted by an automation.) ↩︎

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