PORTRAIT OF A LADY WATCHING PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE
Scene 1. After the opening credits that make you say “Ugh, it’s in French(?!) I wanted to WATCH and not READ a movie…”the next thing we see is a funny little drawing utensil that sort of looks like a primordial pregnancy test scratching on a blank canvas. Pan out, to reveal a handful of French baby dykes in corsets diligently drawing their model, who is also their teacher, clearly, because of a) how hot she is and b) the generic instructions she barks at them (look and my arms! draw my arms!)
As the mademoiselles scratch away on their dried cow hides stretched over wood, they attempt to not cum their pants.
It’s 18th century France. The French Revolution is in 2.5 seconds but the bourgeoisie are enrolling their closeted little daughters in art classes where drawing the human body is considered a noble part of their enlightenment and education and not making porn (which it totally is).
Something at the back of the class catches hot teachers eye;
It’s a portrait. Of a lady. The lady is on fire.
Woah, Woah, Woah. This painting is NOT part of her curriculum! How did it get out from the layers and layers of white sheets she specifically put on it with a sign that definitely said: “My past trauma. I am gay. Please don’t touch.”
Where did you get that? she snaps at the horny brats. From Stock, they reply. “Stock”, which is french for “Spank Bank.”
At first, the teacher gets ready to guillotine her class for this transgression, but she softens when remembering that these girls parents are paying for the rare opportunity to survive without a husband and her mean look is replaced with what I will call “flashback eyes.” For the next two hours we read along, we patiently wait to see the boobs, bush and butt we expect and also deserve…
Scene 2. Okay, so we’re in a flashback, it’s like the Titanic except instead of a giant ship it’s“un petit wooden boat” in the middle of “un grande ocean”. It’s also not like the Titanic at all.
It is 1 to 20 years before Scene 1, unclear because not-yet-art teacher, Marianne, looks exactly the same age. Only now instead of the green costume from a middle school production of Romeo and Juliet, she is wearing a red dress taken from Marie Antoinette’s donation pile. The waves are choppy, and Marianne appears as though she might vomit or she is already actively shitting her pants (and by pants I mean directly under her hoop skirt onto the wooden bench of the boat under her since this was a time before underwear).
All of sudden, a gust of wind so strong it can move wood, knocks her important square box into the water! Marianne is quick to jump in after it. The boat rower, sour from the fact that this woman seems uninterested in him sexually, does not make any sound of concern, or reach out a hand to help her back in, nearly leaving her to drown and reminding us that in 17th Century France all women were disposable and all boat rowers were evil.
Marianne is dropped off on an island in Northwest France called “Britany” which you only know because you are that annoying person who reads Wikipedia during movies. Marianne is wet (not in the hot way) and irritated (kind of in a hot way?). The blob of useless trash in a body of a man rudely grunts out some directions and, true to character, does not offer to help her in any way. He turns around to drown more women who won’t sleep with him leaving Marianne to climb what is surely the highest mountain in the entire world.
“Britany is known for its rugged cliffs, unusual, blush-hued sand and rocks, and castles filled with lesbians.” -www.wikipedia.com
Scene 3. Once an indoor painter kid, always an indoor painter kid, Marianne is breathless by the time she reaches what is undoubtedly the castle from Mel Brooks’ “Frankenstein.” The moist out- of-shape painter is greeted by Sophie, the maid/indentured servant/slave who looks like a cross between Wednesday Adams and a potato. She invites Marianne in, her eyes aglow with the light of her tiny candle-in-a-cup ™. Marianne, female gaze-es herself around her new living, she looks petrified. Or maybe she’s just showing early signs of hypothermia from the earlier dip in the Atlantic. Don’t worry, she has a cozy place to stay: A large creepy abandoned reception hall. Sophie leaves Mariane to get completely naked by a fireplace, and we are so excited about seeing the content of her tata’s that we almost miss the big reveal of her, no pun intended, box’s contents.
IT’S BRAD PITTS HEAD.
Just kidding, two blank canvases, symbolic of a fresh start….
Scene 4. Marianne puts on nightgown that is shear but still not shear enough for our puss thirsty eyes. In this near-naked but could be more naked state, she takes her female gaze for a walk around the grounds, ending up in the kitchen. She stuffs her face with some unrefrigerated gruyere and a hunk of stale bread that’s been there since the middle ages. Sophie enters and almost bursts into tears: never in her life has she seen someone this rude or this beautiful. Marianne asks the maid to bring her some wine and some hot gossip. Sophie is hesitant to divulge and break feudal code, but she knows she must do whatever Marianne who is a pay grade above her asks if she wants to continue in her role as indoor potato maid.
Sophie begins to dish: Mariane’s employer, Heloise, is coming back from nun sleep away camp to get her face on a large frame so that a man can put a ring on her finger and a penis in her vagina. Oh, also Heloise’s sister just died. We don’t know how she died because after Sophie reveals this she then decides she is going to be a vague little cunt about it. She changes the subject, and she tells Marianne that the last painter, a dude, who came to the castle to paint Heloise had to quit. He could not do it. Marianne looks either shocked or maybe, having pounded down all that cheese, she is just farting. Marianne asks more questions but Sophie’s all “J’nese Pas” but we get the sense that she totally SAY PA’.
Scene 4.5 Back in her sleeping quarters, Marianne finds the portrait of her mistress made by her predecessor. There’s a giant smear hole thing where her face should be. The painting is called “Portrait of Every Lady When Painted by A Man.”
Scene 5. The next day is the day before picture day/meet the love of her life Marianne will obsess over in years to come (cum) day. Marianne can’t use her delicate hands for anything besides holding a paintbrush so she makes Slave-phie hold up a dress. The astute viewer will recognize that this dress is identical in color to the one Marianne wears in Scene 1. And the non astute viewer is asleep.Hardcore snoring.
The texture of the dress can only be described as plasticky and hideous. Marianne sighs and doesn’t understand how her employers can be so rich and yet so in love with church basement rummage sales.
Scene 6. Heloise’s mother is a MILF and is sitting under a giant portrait of her face and explains what she wants from Marianne. Basically, the portrait Mariane is to make of her daughter will be given as a gift to a wealthy Milanese gentleman and judging by the size of his orgasm when he jerks off to it, it will be used to decide whether or not he wants to take Heloise as his french bride. Mama tells Marianne that she must pretend to be Heloise’s companion rather than an accomplice in the mail order bride scheme and Marianne wonders if she might have been better off drowned in the Atlantic than brought into these rich people shenanigans.
Scene 7 Marianne is converting her bedroom into a secret sip n paint art studio when there is a knock on her door. It’s Sophie, looking as dumpy as ever. Sophie tells her that Heloise is ready to be taken outside like a dog who needs to piss. In hushed tones, Marianne asks what happened to Heloise’s sister. The dead one. Sophie hesitantly reveals that her former mistress threw herself off of a cliff, right in front of her Christina Ricci eyeballs. Marianne leaves to go find Heloise without apologizing for emotionally triggering this severely traumatized servant.
Scene 8 Heloise is waiting in the foyer and is dressed like Batman, which makes it hard for Marianne, a professional painter, and a professional lesbian, to study her.
Heloise starts running. Her hood falls off. She is blonde. Marianne keeps her distance but increases her speed when Heloise nears the cliffs. Is this bitch gonna kill herself too? Not today. There is still 1 hour and 400 years left of this movie and they haven’t even fucked yet. Heloise stops short.
Heloise: I’ve dreamt of that for years.
Marianne: Dying?
Heloise: Running.
This bit of dialogue was taken directly from a Walgreens’ Hallmark card (or whatever the France equivalent to Walgreens is). But dying and Running do rhyme in French, which, I have to admit, is kinda cool.
Scene 9. After hours and hours of getting cricks in their necks from playing facial ping pong (trying to seem like they aren’t looking at each other while looking at each other so closely, and with so much hotness that they could burn a hole in each-other’s heads) Marianne and Heloise come back to the castle. Heloise, wanting to take her mind off of 1. all the girls she had crushes on in nun school who still haunt her dreams and 2. the prospect of living in such close proximity to her mom, an attractive stranger, and a fucked up maid, demands that Marianne GIVE HER A GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING BOOK, OKAY? Marianne retrieves it from her room with the utmost care to not reveal her secrets: she is a painter and she is gay.
Scene 10. An unspecified amount of time goes by. One night, Marianne returns to her eating spot by the fire and she. is. frustrated. Sophie pours some nasty ass brown liquid, presumably food, into Marianne’s bowl, and asks the painter about her day, not because she particularly cares about Marianne, who, at this point has done nothing but remind her of the horrible suicide she was forced to witness and force her to hold up heavy ugly fabrics, but because she is accustomed to years and years of having to provide not just physical labor but emotional labor too. Sophie wants to keep her job, a shitty as it might be, cause what’s the alternative? sleeping on the beach?
Once given the go ahead, Marianne bitches and moans to Sophie, Sophie, the person who cooks and cleans up after her every single day while she is at this strange island arts residency, some shit about how hard it is to be a sneaky portrait painter. Marianne wishes she didn’t have to maintain these two part time jobs of sad rich homo walker by day and sad rich homo painter by night. It’s just like, how is she even supposed to get ONE DOODLE, JUST ONE DOODLE! on the canvas before Heloise is like: “KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK I’m BORED!!!!!! let’s go hiking in our tiny little piccolo player ribbon clad shoes”
This is harder than she thought.
“I don’t even know what she looks like when she smiles,” the subtitles say.
“Maybe you are boring and not funny,” Sophie offers (I’m paraphrasing, but that is, as the french say, le gist)
Marianne finds this statement from the maid cute and not offensive. Which is a good thing for Sophie because probably due to all the years and years of repression, Marianne could probably snap Sophie in half by just looking at her with those closeted rage eyes. But Marianne is like “You right, girl.”
The two smile at one another and….
Just like that, a newfound trust has blossomed, the distance between two rusty rungs of a working class ladder grows smaller, it might just be the first example of intersectional feminism right there, in bonnets, by a fireplace! Sophie keeps it cool on the outside but on the inside she is as hot as the burning soup she will later scrub from the hot pot, hoping that this painter will be her first friend that is not an inanimate object.
Scene 11 On the beach after walking around with pantyhose covering the lower parts of their faces, Heloise reveals to Marianne her deepest desire: I want to get in the ocean, but I don’t know if I can swim. This of course, a metaphor for I want to lick a pussy but I don’t know if I’ll be killed for it.
Scene 12 Marianne might have a hard time breaking through to Heloise, but she is fucking killing it in this next scene with the MILF(what is the mom’s name? did they say and this was just a subtitle that I blinked through?). The two of them are laughing, making some hilarious and jokes (jokes that are really just very mean things that the mom has to say about her ugly friend??? Idk??? humor in France at that time???? Or is this to make a point about how women have to take other women down a notch as a joke because those are the only jokes they heard around them???? Jury is out.) After she’s done pissing herself with glee MILF says (paraphrasing, here): “I haven’t laughed since before I was forced to get married to a man.” And now the two of them are flirting and it’s like, WOOOOOOAH CAN. THIS. MOVIE. GET. ANY. HOTTER. (and it’s like, um, yes it can, there has been like no sex yet just a lot of furtive glances and while these do make us quiver with anticipation, we wanna see some scissoring, merci beaucoup!)
So, in exchange for this half slander of friend we don’t care about, half intergenerational flirt sesh, Marianne asks the MILF for more time in the art studio and less time on rocky cliffs. MILF gives it to her and she tells Heloise in the next scene that she won’t be tying a pantyhose to her face or coming out to play anymore.
Scene 14. Stuff is getting gayer. Heloise says she missed Marianne when she had to go for a walk alone. Marianne and Heloise share Marianne’s pipe and play the same piano (Marianne is very bad at it but Heloise is still enraptured) Alone and in love, Marianne can’t look at the painting she has made of Heloise without creamin.’ In the dead of night and over wee cups of deep period blood red wine, Marianne asks Heloise’s nameless mother if she can be the one to tell Heloise about the illicit painting she made before she shows it to her. After that, Marianne throws the faceless painting her male predecessor made into the fireplace, perhaps trying to avoid a hard-to-have-conversation with her crush by blowing everyone up as I am pretty sure the castles doesn’t have great ventilation and am pretty sure all paint back then was highly flammable.
Scene 15 Heloise (Batman) and Marianne (Little Red Ridding Hood/Fagin from Oliver!) sit on the beach. Marianne tells Heloise about the painting. Heloise is sulky about it and gets in the ocean. She doesn’t drown. Just gets cold. Quick cut to Heloise surveying the portrait in Marianne’s studio. Apparently, she’s an art expert now and she rips Marianne a new one. They have their first lesbian fight where Marianne gets more defensive the more she knows Heloise is right. She destroys the painting, right when the MILF walks in. She is not pleased. Marianne asks for time to make another one, Heloise says she will actually play along this time, and MILF, totally naive to the romance budding right before her eyes says: “I am going out of town it better be done before I get back” like the super hot Cruella Deville that she is. The mom demands a weird alien kiss from her daughter (“Kiss me like how you did when you were little”…. apparently entails making little forceps with your palms, solemnly kissing the tips of your fingers and putting them up against your mother’s smooth baby butt face) and leaves the two ladies to have what will surely be cunnilingus in the next scene….
Scene 16 WRONG! NO CUNNILINGUS! THE MOVIE, ONCE AGAIN, GOES AGAINST OUR (S)EXPECTATIONS! And how dare it. We are teased with a shot of Marianne’s full on bush promising us if not oral sex at least a steamy horny jerk off scene….right? is that too much to ask? APPARENTLY IT IS! It turns out Marianne is just trying to sleep but she’s on her period and she has cramps. BOOO! PERIODS AREN’T HOT UNLESS YOU ARE DRINKING IT FROM A CUP LIKE YOU WERE IN SCENE 14! BOOO! WHERE’S THE LESBIAN SEX? WHAT DID I BUY THIS HULU FOR? So disappointing. She goes down to Sophie’s fireplace servant quarters and Sophie gives her some hot cherry stones to put on her uterus. It is in this scene we learn that Sophie, in addition to being a deer on meth is also a witch??? Oh, and she’s pregnant with a child she doesn’t want nor can afford.
Scene 17 With Cruella the MILF gone on her mystery business trip (Orgie?! One can only hope. We’re about an hour in. If any coitus is happening at all in this world it is very much OFF screen) Heloise, Marianne, and Sophie have the whole grounds to themselves. They all have a terrific and wholesome time playing cards, cutting up mushrooms, drinking more period blood wine, elementary hoop embroidery, finishing Heloise’s mail order bride catalog profile picture, and trying to give Sophie an abortion. You know typical gal weekend shit! Sophie’s abortion efforts are all a bust and a bummer because nothing seems to be working: not the sprinting back and forth on the beach, the gross boiled magic herbs, or the hanging from a rafter (in such a way that we thought that maybe the maid had hung herself and this movie took a crazy drastic and horrible turn). At the end of this scene Heloise and Marianne bring a very tired and very much still pregnant Sophie to her bed and give each other a look that says: Goddman! We wish whatever man put his P in this dumpling’s Vagee could have thought for one second about the future-and how he might want to see two hot lesbians fuck and how, because of his actions, now he won’t get to, because now we are too tired taking care of this maid he made preggo with his irresponsible load blasting to even think about sex. They say all that. With their eyes. And I just want to be clear, I don’t blame the film directors or writers or producers for the lack of sex (so far) in this film. I blame that guy. He ruined it for all of us.
Scene 18 Marianne is coloring in Heloise’s white face with the color white. Marianne is like: “I know all your little tics more than you know all of my little tics!” and Heloise is like “Nuh-uh! Nuh-uh! I just sit here staring at you the whole time! So I know all of YOUR little tics” and then they try to prove who is more gay.
It’s a tie, ladies! We get it! You’re both gay! Now fuck!
Scene 19 Marianne, Heloise, and Sophie all have their inaugural feminist book club meeting where they discuss and deeply nerd out on the one book on the entire island of Britany and maybe France itself: a copy of The Myth of Orpheus (this is the same one that Marianne begrudgingly loaned to Heloise in Scene…oh, whatever who cares i’m in deep REM.)
Scene 20 The fab three then go attend a bonfire full of singing theater kids who were on the island the whole time but no one noticed! These theater kids sing a spooky song which accidentally casts a spell Heloise making her forget that fire is hot so she gets too close to the flames and her skirt catches and some of the theater kids have to put that hot dyke out! Marianne watches very turned on. In the next scene…..
Scene 21
MARIANNE AND HELOISE FINALLY KISS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Scene 22
Before we witness the first sex scene we have to witness a spooky ghost version of Heloise dressed all in white in the doorway. A re enactment of the Orpheus/Eurydice motif and an homage to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.
Yawn.
And then….the sex scene. YEAHHHH BABBBBBYYYYY. IT. IS. HERE. FINALLY! But hold your applause and multiple orgasms because it’s kinda disappointing. It’s like, an hour and 20 minutes in. At this point we deserve something good for reading this many subtitles. But instead, what SHOULD be fucking Christmas is just Arbor Day, ya know? Just two french necks hitting each other by a fire place. We don’t get no tribing or nothing. Rude!
The next day Sophie knocks on the door, cock blocking these two spooning love birds from any morning action. Sophie is like: “Um, are you going to come with me to go that scary shack where I can get my abortion like you promised you would? Or did you forget about me, you fucking selfish dykes.” Poor Sophie, she deserves more than being a third wheel to these two rich femmes, one who likes to huff paint and the other who looks like Dakota Fanning if Dakota Fanning was made of elastic. If any of my friends promised me they’d go to my abortion and then almost miss it because they had been having sex the night before, i’d be livid! Livid!
Scene 23
Sophie has an abortion while a baby picks her nose.
Scene 24
Sophie is woken up in the night by Heloise who has a “great idea.” The idea is for Marianne to paint Sophie in the same pose she was in for her abortion earlier that day. I don’t know about you but what I definitely want on the very same day I’ve had a hot iron shoved up my hoo ha is to then relive the experience by getting into the same uncomfortable position on a dirty floor while my boss stares at me while her girlfriend draws me in their journal. Where does that painting end up? Not with Sophie probably. Maybe the they offered and she was like “No. I’m good. You can keep it.”
Scene 25
After the short film with in a film: “Portrait of A Lady Having An Abortion” we get to see the short film within a film “Portrait of a Lady Getting A Finger In Her Armpit” The Finger? Covered in a hallucinogenic so powerful it makes you want to have another woman spit water into your mouth. Also, Boobies. This scene has boobies.
Scene 26
Heloise and Marianne look over the painting’s progress. Heloise asks “ How do we know when it is done?” and Marianne is like “At some point we just stop.” And that sad ass statement is how I know there will be no more booby scenes in this film.
Scene 27
PSYCH! In the next scene our gals are naked again. Covered by a sheet. nip slips? Dang, one can hope. They are laying across from each other in the bed and Marianne is drawing something inside of page 28* of Heloise’s book, which is, in fact, Heloise’s book now. (There is probably some very long very boring scene that didn’t make it into the film where Marianne is like: “Can I have my book back?” and Heloise is like: “I mean you can….” and Marianne is like “Are you sure? I mean if you want you can keep it…” And Heloise is like “I do kinda wanna keep it, but I feel bad….” and Marianne is like “No, whatever it’s cool” and then Heloise is like “Is that okaaaaaaay? and then Marianne says: “Yes, it’s okay! I said it was okay! I’m fine with that!” But like, in a way where we know she is actually not fine with that.)
Q: What is the painter drawing?
A: Her own self portrait for her girlfriend to cry-ster-bate (cry and masturbate) to in the cage her soon to be husband lets live in.
Q: How is the painter drawing it?
A: Her girlfriend balances small compact mirror against her vagina**
- *page number will become important.
- **And just like that the movie is no longer an award winning independent foreign film. It is Austin Powers.
Scene 28
There’s a man in the kitchen! This cannot be good. Sure enough: cut to the now finished portrait of Heloise as it is being placed into a box and nailed shut. MILF is delighted. The girlfriends are sad. Every pound of the hammer reminds them that, duh, it’s olden times and no way in fuck was this gonna have a happy ending for gay people. Marianne gets one more look at Heloise and then the longest flashback since the old lady with the necklace on the boat (Titanic) is over. The flashback is over…but the movie is not…
Scene 29
Marianne sees a painting of Heloise in some room where a bunch of men are bumbling about in wigs. Heloise is holding her book, fingers pulling back the cover to reveal: page 28. The “Mirror-Vagina-Self-Portrait-Page”. Marianne looks like she is about to cry: she forgot how much she really wanted to finish that book.
Scene 30
Final scene. Marianne sees Heloise at the symphony bawling her eyes out, which lets Marianne knows Heloise still loves her, and makes the poor ticket taking proletariats at the symphony house so irritated they incite the French Revolution to guillotine all the rich loud symphony cryers in the land.
THE END.
