Céline Sciamma wants you to see that equality is sexy.

In her drama “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” we watch as two women in 18th-century France fall in love. The film, getting a wider American release beginning on Valentine’s Day, has been ecstatically reviewed, won best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated last month for 10 César awards, the French equivalent of the Oscars.

Blissfully absent from the movie are the usual characters queer audiences have come to expect in stories about our lives, like the character who can’t handle being gay, the character who was basically straight anyway, or the character who winds up dead. It’s made us a very generous audience, so unused to seeing ourselves onscreen that we’ll put up with all kinds of nonsense dialogue and dead girlfriends.

But what really sets this movie apart is that by looking for equality between its characters, it leaves a trail of delicately subverted expectations. Part of how it does this is by embracing the unique dynamics that are possible when the two people in love are both women.

The story begins with an artist named Marianne (Noémie Merlant) being thrown around a tiny boat on her way to an island off the Brittany coast, where she’s been hired to paint an aristocrat, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). Héloïse’s suitor, who is from Milan, wants to see her portrait before he marries her, but she is decidedly not interested and has refused to pose. So Marianne is asked to deceive Héloïse, accompanying her on walks to the beach and then painting her from memory in secret.