Her new film Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the year’s most erotic film: a meditation on passion, art and feminism. But the film-maker says her native country just doesn’t get it
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire should carry a health warning: “This film may cause uncontrollable swooning.” Everywhere the French director’s period lesbian romance has been screened – 40 film festivals in total, from Cannes to Aspen and Zurich – it has produced a dizzied, infatuated reaction of the sort not usually associated with a subtitled drama about enlightenment- era portrait artists. All over the globe, Sciamma has seen the passion her film generates, “a tension with the audience – there’s electricity. That’s the thing when you make a love story. You get a lot of love.”
Well, with one exception. “In France, they don’t find the film hot,” says Sciamma matter-of-factly. “‘[They think] it lacks flesh, it’s not erotic. It seems like there are some things that they can’t receive.”
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