Depictions of same-sex relationships have come a long way since the beginning of cinema. Stereotypical characterisations of sexual minorities and other disenfranchised communities continue to take place on both silver and small screens. Within the canon of mainstream cinema, 'women love women' or lesbian representation have received little or decreasing attention (Townsend & Deerwater, 2020, p. 12). Alongside a troubling trend in the film industry to romanticise same-sex relationships between men, the complicated spectrum of women's sexualities is side-lined.

In this context, Madeleine Olnek wrote and produced Wild Nights with Emily (2018) and Céline Sciamma authored Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) stand out. These period films portray what was then considered forbidden or socially transgressive relationships between two women. In doing so, they have transcended certain tropes and conventions in portraying same-sex relationships on screen. Through the lens of 'gaze', this essay will primarily focus on how and why 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' (with 'Wild Nights with Emily' serving as a supporting argument) is considered transgressive within the context of the narrative and in broader queer cinematic canon.

Transgression in Same-sex Romance

Portrait of a Lady on Fire narrates the story of Heloise, an 18th-century French aristocrat betrothed to a Milanese gentleman, and Marianne, the painter commissioned to make a portrait of Heloise for her betrothed. Hesitant to have her likeness captured on a canvas for her fiancé’s pleasure, she refuses to pose for a painter. However, over the course of the film, the two women develop a bond changing Heloise's mind about the portrait. They eventually fall in love with each other.

Wild Nights with Emily traces and interprets the real-life 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson. The film reframes Dickinson’s previously believed to be platonic relationship with her childhood friend and sister-in-law Susan Gilbert as a sexual and romantic one.

In the historical backgrounds of both the protagonists their relationships were forbidden and professing their love for each other in public was unimaginable. The heterosexist patriarchal society of the protagonists perceived any and every sexual behaviour unadhering to strictly codified cisgender heterosexuality to be "deviant" in nature. 

A heterosexist patriarchy functions on the understanding that there exists a severe power imbalance between genders, which strictly favour men over women. Here the reproductive capital and labour of women are packaged as 'currency for the men to barter among themselves within the social structure. Therefore, any deviation from heterosexuality voids women of their reproductive value, thereby threatening patriarchy's active legacy. Thus these two relationships are socially transgressive in their respective temporal and geographic plane.

Male Gaze and Queer Cinema

The gaze in critical theory, simplified, is an individual's perception of another. English art critic John Berger adapted the concept of gaze to further study the relationship and intent, between the audience and the subject of the artwork; "A large part of seeing depends on habits and conventions. Now perspective centres everything on the eye of the beholder. It is like a beam from a lighthouse, only instead of travelling outwards, appearances travel in. Our tradition of art called those appearances reality. Perspective makes the eye the centre of the visible world" (Berger, 1972). According to Berger, taking Manet's painting Olympia as an example he notes, even though it was a progressive piece for the time for breaking the conventions in depicting female nudity, "the ideal spectator (of Olympia) is still male, and the image is designed to flatter him." (Berger, 1972)

Feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey applies Berger's gendered gaze to cinema and conceptualises the term 'male gaze' in her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975). Male gaze centres around the intent of a filmmaker to design the frame of women so that the image of the women pleasure the dominant heterosexual male audience. She writes, "The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role, women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness." (Mulvey, 1975) Here, the filmmaker is the lighthouse that is shining a beam of light onto the woman in front of the camera and reflects the sexualized image back to the beholder.

Since heterosexual men dominate the film industry, they inevitably create media tailored for the pleasure of his fellow heterosexual male audience. Both Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue is the Warmest Color (2013), and Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden (2016) fall into this dilemma. Instead of passively observing the subjects while filming intimate scenes between the queer women, the male heterosexual filmmakers and their camera play an active role in sexualizing the homosexuality of their female subjects. Hence the lack of filmmakers' personal experience with female sexuality results in the creation of an unfortunate by-product - the hypersexualised lesbian sexual experience satiating the scopophilia of their male audience.

Subversive Potential of Female Gaze

Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Wild Nights with Emily highlights the use of two versions of gaze - the gaze of the filmmaker & audience and, the gaze shared by the characters for each other within the narrative and frame.

Breaking Conventions

Marianne sketches Heloise in her book when they go for their daily walks. With the help of those sketches and her memory, she finishes painting Heloise's likeness onto a canvas. On their supposed last day together, Marianne explains how she is a painter by trade and that she is there only to paint Heloise's portrait. Heloise asks to see her portrait after the initial shock of this revelation wears off. Upon showing the Portrait, Marianne finds herself defending her work when Heloise expresses her disappointment.

"Is that how you see me?", asks Heloise. Marianne says the painting is not just an absolute replica of how she perceives Heloise but also is through the lens of "rules, conventions, ideas" of the European style of painting. The scene mentioned above is essential not only to the narrative but also serves as a statement from the author to the audience.

The 'rules, conventions and ideas' Marianne mentions are tools forged and polished to serve a dominant patriarchal narrative of ideating one version of race, class, gender and sexual identity for all. In the script this acts as a stand-in for the male gaze. Sciamma forces both the audience and Marianne to shed the lens of male gaze for the rest of the film. Instead, she wants us to adapt to a different tool - one that is framed by female filmmakers such as her, to portray their lived experience through their eyes; the female gaze. After all, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" (Lorde, 1984)

In Wild Nights with Emily, "I am sick today dear Suzie, I've not been to church. There has been a pleasant quiet in which to think of you. I love your dearly Suzie." These are the lines Emily reads out from her letter to Susan. She reads it while looking directly at the camera, she is looking directly at us - the audience. In retrospect to Emily's life, these moments in the film are important because they address the erasure of same-sex love. Mabel Todd, who edited and posthumously published Emily's writing literally and metaphorically erased Susan's existence as such aspects were not fit for a lady of her stature.

The female gaze, as seen in these films, refuses to sneak peek on their subjects. It is direct and, sometimes, even confrontational. The subjects of the female gaze are acutely aware and blissfully unaware of its existence at the same time, thus they are under no obligation to perform for the audience all the while maintaining a sense of bodily autonomy. The camera adopts the role of a passive observer while filming intimate scenes. Mise-en-scene, along with the framing devices demystify the sexuality of the characters; gone are the suggestive lighting and long lingering shots of the body. They are instead replaced with the women sharing their affection using gentle gestures and words.

The Female Gaze and Equality

In Jeremy Tambling's analysis of Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together (1997), he writes, "We cannot work within a critical paradigm where it is asked if the actor is sufficiently realistic in a part, because that assumes that the audience already knows what a particular identity looks like - which is to accept the power of ideology and the received idea." Similarly, same-sex representation through a heterosexual lens could subtextually write that heterosexuality into the identities of same-sex couples; thereby heteronormatively coding one as the dominant (masculine, provider), and the other as the submissive (feminine, caretaker). 

During one of their painting sessions, Marianne confesses "Forgive me, I'd hate to be in your place" to her posing subject. Heloise replies, "We're in the same place, exactly in the same place." This scene set the stage for the second version of the female gaze that the film discusses - the gaze exchanged between the characters. Marianne’s confession comes after her describing minute gestures of Heloise, indicating that Marianne is more versed in Heloise’s body language (thereby her psyche) than she gets credit for. This creates a power vacuum between them. So, when Heloise fires back “If you look at me, who do I look at?” falls poignantly and her canting Marianne’s body language restores the equilibrium of power. They use gaze as a tool for the two characters to bond whether it is during playing cards or while reading the tragedy of Orpheus & Euridice. 

Owing to the proximity of their houses, Emily and Susan often gaze at each other from their bedrooms. Unable to be with each other physically each night, they express their love and desire through their longing gaze. While poised and composed to the outside world, they do not hold back their expression while in each other’s company.

The difference between the characters in these two narratives stem primarily from their class differences. The female gaze as such breaks the barriers of class to bring a true sense of equality among them. The hierarchical class differences which existed during the earlier section in Portrait of a Lady on Fire are almost absent by the end - which was facilitated by the gaze shared between the two characters in between.

Conclusion

When lesbian women and their narratives are written by people with no lived experience of the lesbian identity, those narratives tend to fall flat. Films like Blue is the Warmest Color and The Handmaiden are victims of just that. Although the above-mentioned examples help to bring forth same-sex identities to the public consciousness, they are less than ideal representations of their real-life counterparts.

On the other hand, written and directed by lesbian women, Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Wild Nights with Emily serve as stellar examples of cinema about queer women history conveniently omitted. Not only did they write transgressive romance, but they also transgressed from the traditional mode of narrative filmmaking. Avoiding the traps set by the cinematic language moulded for a century of heteronormativity by weaponizing their narratives with the feminist tool of the female gaze.

They also act as an argument for more diversity both in front and behind the camera, not only for the narratives that focus on sexual minorities, but also in major productions to increase the visibility and for accurately portraying their lives.