“Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” directed by Céline Sciamma, offers a profound exploration of gesture as both artistic technique and political commentary. Set in France in 1770, the film follows Marianne, a painter commissioned to create a wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young woman recently removed from a convent to be married to a man she has never met. Since Héloïse refuses to pose, Marianne must observe her secretly during daily walks, memorizing her features to paint her portrait in private.
The film’s central dynamic of observation and being observed creates a visual language that challenges the patriarchal structures of 18th century France. As Rodríguez suggests in her work, gestures can “highlight the everyday labor of political, social, and sexual energies” that exist within oppressive systems. The act of looking becomes a gesture of resistance in a society where women were objects to be viewed rather than subjects with agency.
When Héloïse returns Marianne’s gaze, it disrupts the traditional power dynamics of portraiture and the male gaze. This mutual looking transforms into a form of intimate communication that exists outside patriarchal language. Their exchanged glances, cautious touches, and subtle movements create what Rodríguez calls “a stream of gestures [that] occasions the possibility of thinking about discourse as constituting a corporeal practice.”
Gesture as Political Resistance
The relationship between Marianne and Héloïse functions as a form of rebellion against the social constraints of their time. Héloïse’s resistance to her arranged marriage is reflected in her initial refusal to pose for her portrait, which is intended to be sent to her prospective husband. Meanwhile, Marianne must sign her father’s name to her paintings because women were excluded from the artistic establishment.
Their gestures of intimacy—hands briefly touching, bodies gradually moving closer, stolen glances—become political acts that challenge the heteronormative structures that govern their lives. These moments embody Rodríguez’s observation that “gestures reveal the inscription of social and cultural laws, transforming our individual movements into an archive of received social behaviors and norms.” By creating their own gestural language, Marianne and Héloïse temporarily escape these inscriptions while simultaneously highlighting them.
Embodied Memory in the Final Scene
The film’s remarkable final scene demonstrates how “memory and feeling are enacted and transformed through bodily practices.” In a four-minute unbroken shot, we watch Héloïse at a concert as she listens to Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”—specifically the piece Marianne once played for her on the harpsichord. The camera remains fixed on Héloïse’s face as she experiences a profound emotional response to the music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaaH09v3GKk
Her breathing, facial expressions, and eventual tears communicate what words cannot: the embodied memory of her relationship with Marianne living on in her body long after their separation. This scene powerfully illustrates Rodríguez’s concept that gestures can “signal a futurity, even if it refuses its arrival.” Though their love cannot continue, the memory persists through the body’s gestures, creating a form of resistance to the temporary nature of their relationship.
Through its meticulous attention to gesture, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” offers a visual meditation on how bodies communicate beyond language, particularly when operating within restrictive social structures that seek to limit autonomy and desire.
2 replies on “Gesture Portrait of a Lady on Fire”
Thoroughly enjoyed reading your analysis of gaze and its connection to our discussion of gesture and its portrayal in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I love this movie! I just watched it on Valentine’s day and thought, somewhat similarly, how intimate of a movie this was despite both women barely engaging in physical intimacy, except towards the very end. Even then, we were not given a clear shot of their physical intimacy. It was more hinted to. I left the theater confused as to how the director created such an amazing depiction of sapphic love with the gestures that were offered to the audience. Their gaze, in particular, was a gesture that everyone engaged in in the film but when it was between the two main actresses, it was more focused on and lingered for the scenes that came afterward. Their “act of looking,” became, “a gesture of resistance in a society where women were objects to be viewed rather than subjects with agency” that also viewed. Them falling in love with each other is intrinsically tied to them reclaiming agency in their most valued aspects of life (relationships and love). Although the two actresses had come from different backgrounds and came together because of a lie, their gestures i.e. their gazes were small acts of resistance and reclamation.
If you’ve seen Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Ammonite, or really any lesbian period piece, you have to watch this SNL sketch: “Lesbian Period Drama”.
It perfectly skewers the recycled tropes of WLW films with lines like:
“Another film that isn’t afraid to ask: Will these lesbians be lesbians together?”
Honestly, I could spend hours unpacking the brilliance of this sketch—but I’ll limit myself to the last 90 seconds, which are pure gold:
“Twelve lines of dialogue. Two and a half hour run time.”
“Featuring Academy Award-winning Glance Choreography and Best Supporting Actress nominee, the wind.”
“Watch in heated anticipation as they round all the bases: grazing fingers, washing carrots, and fast aggressive this.”
Cinevue raves, “I saw their nude backs, which made me think of their fronts, which is where the boobs are.”
And of course: “There’s a drawing scene.”
All leading up to: “A sex scene so graphic you’ll think, ‘Oh right, a man directed this.’”
What makes this sketch so sharp—and so inadvertently brilliant—is how it parodies not just the plotlines, but the gestural language of lesbian period dramas. Juana María Rodríguez, in “Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings,” argues that gesture is where queer desire often lives: in subtle, fleeting, often wordless acts that refuse containment in identity labels or linear narratives. Gesture, for Rodríguez, is a form of queer worldmaking—it communicates longing, refusal, intimacy, and resistance in ways that language cannot or will not.
The SNL sketch makes humor out of exactly these gestures: the lingering glances, the hesitation before touch, the sensuality of mundane acts like washing carrots. It captures how entire emotional arcs in WLW films are often carried by bodily cues rather than spoken dialogue. That line—“Twelve lines of dialogue. Two and a half hour run time”—isn’t just a joke about pacing; it’s a joke about queer spectatorship, about how much we’re asked to read into the quiet.
Rodríguez also emphasizes how queer gestures often generate a surplus of meaning—what she might call affective excess. That’s beautifully skewered in the line:
“I saw their nude backs, which made me think of their fronts, which is where the boobs are.”
Here, the audience’s interpretive labor is front and center. Lesbian viewers are often trained to grasp at subtext, to mine every brush of skin or second of silence for signs of intimacy. These films rely on viewers co-producing meaning through gesture—reading what is implied, hinted at, or momentarily revealed. The sketch teases that hunger and our susceptibility to overinterpretation, while also validating it.
The sketch also reveals how easily gesture can be betrayed when it’s forced into the wrong cinematic grammar. That final line—
“A sex scene so graphic you’ll think, ‘Oh right, a man directed this’”—
draws attention to the rupture that happens when gestural buildup crashes into overexposed, male-gaze-driven climax. The tender world of glances and wind gives way to a jarring reassertion of patriarchal framing. For Rodríguez, gesture thrives in the space of ambiguity, delay, and subtlety—qualities often stripped away when desire is visualized according to dominant norms.
Even the joke about “Best Supporting Actress nominee, the wind” isn’t just atmospheric—it’s gestural. It’s the environmental texture that gives shape to longing, to what can’t be said out loud. In lesbian period films, wind carries not just sound or movement, but feeling. It enters the frame as a co-conspirator in queer delay and emotional suspension.
And of course—
“There’s a drawing scene.”
What is the drawing scene if not a visual metaphor for queer gesture? It’s intimate, tentative, erotic without being explicit. It’s another kind of touch.
The genius of this sketch lies in how it recognizes—and mocks—the cinematic vocabulary of queer gesture while still affirming its power. These jokes land because we’ve been trained to find so much meaning in a fingertip hover, in a breath held too long. Through comedy, SNL reveals what Rodríguez helps us name: that queer gestures matter not because they are grand, but because they aren’t. They linger, delay, sidestep. They ask us to feel before we define.