Equal love and agency: reappropriating myths in Portrait of a Lady in Flames

Portrait of a Lady in Flames breaks with the tradition of unequal love through the equal love and agency of Marianne and Eloise, and reinterprets the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a new light. The film uses portraiture and mythology to emphasize the agency of love and separation, and the process of actively choosing memories and recollections.

 

In this paper, I will analyze the film Portrait of a Lady in Flames in terms of love and farewell and the reappropriation of the Orpheus and Eurydice myths. First, I will argue that the film continues to emphasize the beauty of “love as a mutual subject on an equal footing” through the relationship between Marianne and Eloise and other devices. In the movie, marriage and love are clearly unequal for women of the time. Eloise and her mother are not even allowed to see each other’s faces when marrying their husbands, and must send their own portraits first. While her mother wishes to pass on her history of inequality, Eloise wishes for equal love, citing equal treatment as one of the reasons she loves the convent.
I think the movie shows us through the portrait that Eloise and Marianne’s relationship changes to one of equality and they fall in love. There are two portraits of Eloise in the movie. The first one is painted by Marianne from a one-sided, observational point of view, hiding the fact that she is a painter, and the second one is painted by Marianne when she is standing in front of Eloise and is “on equal footing” with her. In the second portrait, Marianne says that she would be uncomfortable being put in ‘that position’ of being the subject of the painting. But Eloise says, “We are on equal footing,” and “when you look at me, I look at you,” reversing the objectivity of the portrait subject to subjectivity in front of Marianne and the audience. If the process of painting the portrait is seen as a process of deepening love, the scene can be seen as a departure from the unequal love that prevailed in society at the time, and as the two achieving a love that is both equal and subjective.
The movie also portrays farewells as something to remember and reminisce about, not as a horror or regret, and as an active choice rather than a passive one. In the movie, Marianne is asked when she knows when she’s finished painting, and she replies, “When I stop painting, I’m done.” This scene is a farewell to a loved one. I think this scene suggests that saying goodbye to a loved one is also an active choice on the part of the individual to stop loving. Furthermore, in the face of this choice, both Marianne and Eloise prepare to remember and remember well. Rather than spend time dreading and fearing the goodbye that lies ahead, they share a portrait of each other to remember their love. Rather than regretting the past, they rewrite the history of their love together, telling each other the truths they never got to tell.
This separation between Marianne and Eloise can also be seen as a reappropriation of the myth of the love story of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the middle of the movie, Eloise reads the myth of Orpheus’ attempt to bring his wife Eurydice back from the underworld. Breaking his promise to the gods not to look back while escaping the underworld, Orpheus looks back at Eurydice as she follows him, at which point Marianne suggests that he made a “poet’s choice,” while Eloise suggests that Eurydice could have said, “Look back. Later, in their final goodbye, Marianne is seen as Orpheus and Eloise as Euridice, and Eloise tells Marianne to “look back. After breaking up with Eloise, Marianne returns to her life as a painter and submits a painting of Orpheus looking back, and is told by a critic that it feels like a farewell. The myth of Orpheus, who broke his promise to the god because he was impatient, and Eurydice, who was dragged to the underworld without being able to spit out a word, can be seen as a myth of beautiful farewells, appropriated by Eloise’s declaration of “look back” in the film and Eurydice’s agency through Marianne’s artwork.