fragments of a review.

a movie that moves rapidly and makes bold choices that overwhelm, such that it's only on rewatch did Old work thematically for me. the beach and the characters of varying ages are Shyamalan’s tools to rewind, play, and fast forward our lives, and finally get us to the point where we may be no more. a period where time starts running out, all our regrets and mistakes amplified, but we can’t seem to rectify anything (or leave a neat little bow on our entire life if you will), all we can do is accept the situation and bask in that peace — Shyamalan’s most bombastic movie, but one that also feels like his most personal.

unless you’re John Wick, the R-rating [for violence/gore] mostly works as window-dressing to a story that’s fully realized, and it’s only after 30 minutes does this seem to understand that — probably when James Gunn comes off his high from the complete free-will WB has given him — and at which point i started loving it. each moment starts deepening the empathy for the squad, portraying them as villains with their own baggage trying to stay afloat in a world that’s more villainous than them, sucking up all the moral ambiguity from the idea of a Suicide Squad. another draft of the script would’ve helped here, but the very core of this is the best kind of blockbuster: silly and sincere.

a massive ego project for LeBron and Warner Bros. once the rush of “hey, look that’s ____” wears off, there’s absolutely nothing here that will stimulate your brain beyond processing some colorful images and the more it continues to go on, it starts to feel like your soul is leaving your body.

Intentionality is always elusive with Shyamalan, but there's a sense of confidence here washing over the extremist vibe (every choice is bold with a capital B) that makes you feel like you're in good hands. It's less concerned with exploring maturity in relation to age, instead wanting to be a B-movie where the substance is the fantastical setting and the enjoyment is derived from the characters being thrust upon it. A ridiculous time, but a good time nonetheless. With that said, a part of me wishes Gaspar Noe had made this movie.

at its core, family dynamics is a proposition, economic perhaps, but mainly of love and support. but, the malleability of them inherently makes them exploitable for only the benefit of the parents. what happens to the daughter in an unhealthy family dynamic who doesn’t know better is the heart of Kajillionaire. it’s not sensationally funny, but it’s not trying to be. the jokes immediately explore something deeper in these characters. through it, Miranda July particularly finds an incredible amount of empathy in emotionally starved Old Dolio, who Evan Rachel Wood plays perfectly. she almost floats across every scene, physically but not mentally present, distant from everyone else around her, until she’s given the chance to break away. it’s depressing, but there is an incredible amount of warmth here, almost creating a cinematic blanket.

Dismantling a Heteronormativity through the Female Gaze

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait) is a culmination of not only Celine Sciamma's past works but also her personal life up until this point. She has depicted many social issues, from sexual discovery in teenagers in Water Lilies to the confines of a gender binary society in Tomboy. Each one of her films effectively confronts common prejudices. Her filmmaking fosters empathy with those individuals as it embodies cinema's ability to transport the audience into a world permeated with issues, conflicts, and desires unlike theirs.

Sciamma's most recent film, Portrait, is a period piece that riffs on the themes of her previous films while portraying two women falling in love. It is no surprise that Portrait holds importance in the landscape of LGTBQ media. This portrait of a lesbian relationship is part-heartbreaking and part-liberating, but above all, it subverts the prejudices associated with LGBTQ relationships through its commentary on the gaze. Personally, I attribute much of my normalized view of those relationships due to this film. I lived in India for over half of my life. It was nearly impossible to witness an LGBTQ relationship in public as it was stigmatized by society to an overwhelming degree. While I had always accepted this relationship, there was a point that I didn't view them as equal to heterosexual love. Portrait was my antidote to that issue.

Portrait undercuts exploitative portrayals of lesbian relationships, partly through its carefully thought-out formal elements, one of which is the island's setting in Brittany, France. It is the blank canvas upon which Sciamma crafts her world detached from a reality defined by patriarchy. This sense of liberation prevails, despite the impending marriage that looms over the interactions between women in the film. This concept manifests in a world where the objectification of women is averted because male characters cannot dominate the frame and be used as an anchor point by how we look into the frame, a result of the male gaze.
According to Mulvey's essay, Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema, the male gaze essentially leads to a sexualization and objectification of women to men's delight. It enforces the patriarchal perspective of love and relationships, which often sees women on a surface level and a representation of men’s desires. They do not have any characteristics of their own other than their looks, which are sexualized. As Ashley Connor, the cinematographer of The Miseducation of Cameron Post, says, "the 'male' gaze seeks to devour and control" (Telfer). The repetition of this specific male gaze can alter the audience's perception of the female, seeing them only as objects. Portrait poses the question, what happens when two females are involved in a relationship on screen.

Blue is the Warmest Color is another film that depicts a lesbian romance that has been subject to controversy. Marion Krauthaker, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, examines the film's exploitation of the lesbian relationship. By comparing the graphic novel on which the movie was based, she finds glaring attempts to tailor to the male perspective, whether it be men taking charge of discussion on the female pleasure or the voyeuristic, fantasized, and overly detailed lesbian sex scenes that resemble pornography. Even Julie Maroh, the author of the graphic novel, describes how the portrayal of the sex scenes, in particular, leads the audience to react in troubling ways. Heterosexuals find these explicit scenes ridiculous due to their excessive length. The homosexuals find it uncredible due to the depiction of intimacy as it captures a variety of unlikely positions. "The only ones who do not hear are the potential guys who are too busy getting an eyeful in front of the incarnation of one of their fantasies" (Krauthaker and Connolly).

Blue takes this relationship back into the confines of patriarchy, continuing the separation of the female experience from the woman herself and denying selfhood to them. It is engaged in the issues of a lesbian relationship without granting the lead couple any agency to retort, leading to the film depicting this lesbian relationship as perverse. Rather than challenging these harmful prejudices of LGBTQ relationships, it is complacent with them. This is what results from the male gaze and its control of the lesbian relationship. Sciamma sees a need to reinforce her story through the eyes of the female (the female gaze), and it's the defining element of Portrait.

Instead of the audience looking into the frame for the derivation of pleasure, Sciamma's characters gaze back at them. The movie is shot through the subjective point of view, where the camera stands in for the characters, which allows Portrait to dismantle the object/artist relationship of the women characters not only between them and the audience but also between them and the other individuals in the movie. The audience's gaze is reciprocated back, and it equalizes the power dynamic. The female gaze is not objectifying or controlling men; instead, it's "emotional and intimate. It sees people as people. It seeks to empathize rather than to objectify." (Telfer). Through this, the power dynamic of an active male and passive female is diminished.

Portrait is a commentary of the gaze, male and female. The film hinges on an ever-evolving dynamic between the artist and the subject. In the film, Marianne arrives on an isolated island of Brittany. She had been commissioned to paint a portrait of a young woman named Heloise, who is to be married off to a Milanese nobleman. However, Heloise refuses to pose for a portrait, as she doesn't want to get married, much less with someone she doesn't know. Marianne acts as Heloise's companion and accompanies her on daily walks memorizing her features to paint her in secret.

Marianne employs the gaze, scrutinizing Heloise's facial features and hand placements, with the intent of pleasing her fiancé through the portrait. Marianne is always seeking something out of Heloise each time she sees her. In a scene with the maid, Sophie, she remarks that she hasn't witnessed Heloise smile even once. Sophie remarks, "Have you tried to be funny?"

Sophie's remark is brief yet powerful. Marianne is asking for Heloise to express herself, yet she gives nothing in return, not even time. In order to conform to the popular conventions, rules, and ideas of the time and be secretive in her efforts, Marianne wields the voyeuristic male gaze creating an unequal power dynamic. In response to this, Heloise gazes back at Marianne with displeasure to equalize that power dynamic and, primarily, understand her.

Portrait is determined in letting its conflict between the female gaze, which Heloise exhibits, and the male gaze, which Marianne exhibits, simmer across the frame. In these moments, the film is told through those hypnotic glances and gazes, where the characters slowly find an affinity with each other. The relationship between the leads has not yet involved physical intimacy so that audiences can primarily identify with these characters and their bond. Portrait interrupts the evolution of that bond in a moment where the secret is revealed to Heloise, Marianne makes Heloise laugh, and Heloise finally sees the portrait.

Heloise looks at her portrait but is unable to find herself on the canvas. This is Sciamma's moment of dismantling the male gaze and reinforcing the female gaze. This allows the film to present an LGBTQ relationship that respects the partners' humanity, making the audience witness a lesbian relationship without fixating on their sexual orientation. She does this in eight lines of dialogue, which confronts the artist's gaze from Heloise's perspective. She says, "Is this how you see me?"

The audience empathizes with Heloise and unconsciously finds this objectifying gaze troublesome and denial of her personhood. Suddenly, that sense of empathy lets the audience find themselves in place of Heloise, and our perception of "normal" in terms of assigning identities to gender is effectively dismantled. The artist/subject relationship is a commentary on, and eventual dismantling of, the heteronormative worldview, yet it is what happens afterward that genuinely challenges the patriarchal view of relationships, which is between two individuals of the opposite sex.

The audience is used to witnessing little moments of LGBTQ relationships that seem to be engineered with the sole purpose of being missed with the blink of an eye. It is showing a lesbian kiss or containing a dialogue that casually refers to the character's same sex-relationship, without any substance other than their sexual orientation. Therefore, it's hard to see them as normal human beings in comparison to others around them. For audiences who may have considered these relationships abnormal, Portrait tackles years of one-dimensional homosexual love by taking the turning point where Marianne reveals the painting and letting the characters start over just as the audience does. The characters, and their motives, goals, nuances, are seen from both perspectives, and the audience witnesses it. It makes the scenes where the couple starts to notice each other's mannerisms invigorating and cements Sciamma's intention to paint a relationship between two women rather than two lesbians. When the movie finally reaches the first kiss, after an extensive build-up of character and mutual affection, it never feels out of place.

This setting makes the idea of lesbian love tangible to the audience. But the audience's newfound female gaze, a focus on characters and their bond, and the slow lead up to the first kiss make the lesbian relationship no different from a heterosexual relationship. The prejudice of a same-sex relationship is deprived of its power. It becomes two people falling in love. The movie never uses physical intimacy to exploit two females but rather to represent "desire and the thought of desire" (Aguilar). Each scene depicting nudity and kissing is brief and purposeful in the evolution of the character's bond, as it never comes across as spectacle, stopping the narrative for exploitative eroticism. Also, the camera stays close to the couple's faces during these scenes, capturing the romantic intimacy of the couple.

Sciamma's most significant hurdle is leaving her audience permanently affected, which she does by manifesting a relation between the film's women-centric world and our heteronormative world through the camera lens. Claire Mathon, the cinematographer, said, "we wanted to invent our own 18th century—our 2018th century… by giving it a contemporary resonance". Unlike many period pieces, the film is strikingly modern in its approach. It was shot with 7K digital cameras, lacking the film grain of many older movies, with an emphasis on saturated primary colors (Aguilar). With this modern look but period setting, Sciamma puts the film in conversation with the present to realize the stigmatic nature of these relationships and makes the audience find the bond they created with these characters sadly feel impossible. It reminds them that certain countries criminalize LGBTQ relationships, and in America, despite the progress, they are discriminated against in the fundamental aspects of life, like applying for a job and buying a house (Moreau).

To combat the narrative trope of a doomed lesbian romance, Sciamma subverts the reasons behind what we consider an impossible romance. The clock of impending doom for these characters is set from the very first frame. Heloise is about to get married, per the wishes of her mother and her aristocratic society. Yet, Portrait never acknowledges the conception of a lesbian relationship and its role in the separation. That's something that the audience projects. When combined with the modern presentation, it makes the point that we are the reason these two women can't love each other and enforces the idea that the progress made in destigmatizing LGTBQ relationships is minuscule. The audience is asked to question their role in the barring of true love, and through it, they start to see Heloise and Marianne as equal to heterosexual love.

Works Cited)
Telfer, Tori. “How Do We Define the Female Gaze in 2018?” Vulture, Vulture, 2 Aug. 2018, www.vulture.com/2018/08/how-do-we-define-the-female-gaze-in-2018.html.
Krauthaker, Marion, and Roy Connolly. “Gazing at Medusa: Adaptation as Phallocentric Appropriation in Blue Is the Warmest Color.” European Comic Art, vol. 10, no. 1, Mar. 2017, p. 24. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsglr&AN=edsgcl.536988551&site=eds-live&scope=site
(c)AGUILAR, CARLOS. “YEAR ON FIRE: How French Cinematographer Claire Mathon Shot the Love Stories Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Atlantics.” MovieMaker, vol. 27, no. 134, Winter 2020, pp. 36–38. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f3h&AN=141705425&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, 1975, www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/feminism/mulvey.pdf.
Moreau, Julie. “Most LGBTQ Americans Experience Harassment, Discrimination, Harvard Study Finds.” NBC News, NBCUniversal News Group, 26 Nov. 2017, www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/most-lgbtq-americans-experience-harassment-discrimination-harvard-study-finds-n823876.