Sciamma inverts every trope. Here, the gaze is female, reciprocal, and non-violent. Marianne looks at Héloïse to paint her, but Héloïse looks back, and their mutual looking generates desire. There is no male character to triangulate their relationship. In one famous scene, the women discuss the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, concluding that Orpheus makes the “poetic choice” to turn around and lose his wife—a metaphor for the male artist sacrificing the female muse for his art. Sciamma’s film rejects this: the artist does not sacrifice her subject; she joins her.
The Gazed and the Grounded: Exploring Culture and Gender Through Narrative Film exploring culture and gender through film ebook
Moving from Hollywood to a transnational co-production, Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding complicates any simple reading of “Indian” gender roles. The film follows a Punjabi family in Delhi preparing for an arranged marriage. On the surface, it presents a traditional culture where women’s honor is tied to virginity (the cousin Ria reveals past sexual abuse by a family uncle) and men are expected to be providers. Sciamma inverts every trope
Culturally, the film argues that gender is not a biological given but a set of restrictions (Héloïse forced into marriage) that, when removed, reveal a fluid, egalitarian intimacy. The absence of men and the rejection of the voyeuristic camera angle (Sciamma insists on two-shots and equal eyelines) propose a new cinematic grammar—one where culture is not a prison but a canvas for mutual creation. There is no male character to triangulate their relationship
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is arguably the most self-conscious deconstruction of the male gaze in contemporary film. Set in 18th-century Brittany, the plot concerns a female painter, Marianne, commissioned to paint a wedding portrait of Héloïse, a reluctant bride. Héloïse refuses to sit for previous painters; Marianne must observe her in secret.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window serves as a masterclass in the gendered politics of looking. Confined to a wheelchair, photojournalist L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies (James Stewart) spends his time observing his neighbors across the courtyard. His girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), a high-fashion socialite, physically enters his apartment but is initially dismissed as “too perfect” and outside his masculine world of action.