France, 1770. Marianne, a painter, is commissioned to do the wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young woman who has just left the convent. Héloïse is a reluctant bride to be and Marianne must paint her without her knowing. She observes her by day, to paint her secretly.

In partnership with the Department of French & Italian.

-

What follows is a subtle and thrilling love story, at once unsentimental in its realistic assessment of women’s circumstances and almost utopian in its celebration of the freedom that is nonetheless available to them. Céline Sciamma, the writer and director — her previous features include “Waterlilies” and “Girlhood” — practices a feminism without dogma or illusion. She takes as given the constraints facing Héloïse and Marianne and the burdens of inequality that affect Sophie (Luana Bajrami), a young household servant, but resists the temptations of melodrama or didacticism. This is less a chronicle of forbidden desire than an examination of how desire works. Like a lost work of 18th-century literature, it is at once ardent and rigorous, passionate and philosophical.

Héloïse, the artist’s model and the object of Marianne’s attention, at first occupies a familiar position. Haenel, radiantly blonde with an enigmatic, neo-Classical face, fuses movie-star charisma with aristocratic poise. But Héloïse, when she finally submits to Marianne’s painterly scrutiny, hardly surrenders her own powers of observation. She is looking too, and the power of their mutual attraction refracts like light passing through a prism.