It is often said that the history of art is one that favours men looking at women — and the cinema, with its notoriously entrenched canon that diminishes the contributions of female filmmakers, has certainly done its part in enshrining the male gaze as the default mode of expression.

While hardly didactic, Portrait of a Lady on Fire — the exhilarating new period film by French writer-director Céline Sciamma (Girlhood) — sets out less to subvert this phenomenon than to explicitly reproach it, foregrounding the female gaze by way of a hypnotically swooning romance between a reticent young noblewoman and the artist commissioned to paint her.

Sciamma opens the movie on a canvas that fills the frame, gently aligning her audience's perspective as a girl's hand applies delicate brushstrokes to an image — a portrait of Marianne (Noémie Merlant), whose recollection of her seaside romance will become an act of illuminating a secret history.

It is late-18th century Brittany, and Marianne has been dispatched to a remote coastal island on a commission to paint the portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), a noblewoman recently returned from a convent — and promised in marriage to a man she has never met.

Marianne (Noémie Merlant) initially struggles to find authentic vision in artistic tradition. ( Supplied: Madman Films )

Héloïse is reluctant to sit for the portrait because she refuses the marriage for which the painting will serve as a gift. A previous, male, artist had tried and failed to capture her image, resulting in a dramatically abandoned painting in which a sort of cosmic abyss yawns from the canvas in place of her head.

It is one of many striking, forceful images of the portrait — a bratty paint bomb tossed in a venerable gallery — that linger in the mind.

"You must paint her without her knowing," instructs Héloïse's Italian mother (Valeria Golino), inaugurating a dance of wits as Marianne, under the guise of a "walking companion", hustles to steal furtive glimpses of her elusive subject.

As Marianne trails Héloïse across the windswept cliffs, Sciamma teases the reveal of her star, tracking a Vertigo-esque cluster of blonde hair and the shape of a hooded cloak against the sky, until the camera dramatically regards Haenel — a scarf wrapped around her face to reveal only her magnetic blue eyes — and she in turn fires back, her glance at once an enigma and a challenge.

Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) is both fierce and enigmatic. ( Supplied: Madman Films )

The pursuit gradually gives way to attraction — at first curious and intellectual, as Héloïse lowers her guard to Marianne's attentive questions (and Merlant's disarming eyes, which threaten to engulf the screen) — and eventually, romantic, as the two women form a kind of symbiosis; less artist and muse than equals, returning each other's gaze in a collaborative process.

"Look at me," Marianne instructs Héloïse, as the latter finally agrees to sit for her portrait, not so much a demand to pose than an invitation to reciprocate the creation.

It is no surprise that the portrait flourishes in this resculpted place of queer desire; a mischievous half-smile curls across Héloïse's face, impossible for her to suppress.

There is an intoxicating stillness to this drama, an attention to silence and evocative, dreamlike sounds — brushstrokes, crackling flames, waves against the shoreline — that suggest everything is playing out in a detached and sacred space.

Sciemma presents a fleeting, intimate world uninterrupted by men. ( Supplied: Madman Films )

Naturally, there is not a man in sight on the island.

Marianne and Héloïse's only regular companion is the young housemaid, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), with whom they forge a clandestine sisterhood — and whose unwanted pregnancy leads to one of the film's most resonant moments, a candlelit abortion that doubles as a tender tribute to women forced to nurture each other in the shadows.

This notion of underground sisterhood flourishes in the film's rapturous centrepiece, a campside gathering of women in the dead of night that invokes the ancient rites of spiritual communion — complete with incantatory singing, tribal handclaps, and the year's most electrifying eye contact, forged over forbidden fire.

Literally burning with desire. ( Supplied: Madman Films )

The images seem to emerge from darkness like a half-remembered dream, summoned forth by cinematographer Claire Mathon, whose gift for low-light trances and eerie seascapes recalls her haunting work on Mati Diop's Atlantics.

"Do all lovers feel like they're inventing something," wonders Héloïse, and the film all but makes a case for art born anew — or at the very least, regarded through fresh eyes (Sciamma even manages a cheeky riff on the "draw me like one of your French girls" gag, a scene — you'll know when you see it — that skirts the sublime and the ridiculous).

Sketch me like one of your French girls. ( Supplied: Madman Films )

The film also represents an act of memory for Sciamma, who was previously in a relationship with Haenel — the star of the director's great debut, Water Lilies (2007) — and who wrote Portrait of a Lady on Fire expressly for her former lover to headline.

The personal element adds an extra ripple to the drama, and its bittersweet final sequence, in which the lovers must cling to the abstract in the face of Héloïse's impending heterosexual doom.

Marianne and Héloïse discuss whether or not Orpheus (of the Ancient Greek myth) had known that his wife, Eurydice, was behind him all along as he ascended from the underworld — but turned to face her in a deliberate bid to hold on to her memory, consigning her to death.

The viewer is drawn into the intense and captivating relationship between the two women. ( Supplied: Palace Films )

The theory catches the quietly devastating tone of the film's finale, in which the entire story seems to swell up and replay across Haenel's enormous, sobbing eyes — and memory becomes more powerful than anything that could exist in the present.

"When do we know it's finished?" Héloïse had asked Marianne as her portrait neared what seemed to be completion. But even as their love is surrendered to memory and social charade, we know that it will never truly be over — and that, however many centuries later, the cultural shift of which they could only dream might finally be possible.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is in cinemas from December 26.

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