Review of Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) by Brent_Marchant — 11 Jul 2020

While terms like "masterpiece" have been freely bandied about concerning this French period piece drama about forbidden romance, this beautifully filmed, exquisitely staged and well-acted offering nevertheless gets weighed down by sluggish pacing, an anticlimactic and often-predictable script, extraneous story threads, and an occasional lacking in gut-level believeability.

Director Celine Sciamma's latest may be a joy to look at, and its content may indeed constitute an earnest, heartfelt feminine manifesto, but it often comes across as somewhat tentative and restrained in going all-out for what it really wants to say (especially with a title that includes the words "on fire" in it).

To be sure, this is a fine piece of filmmaking in many regards, but rising to the level of "masterpiece" sincerely requires more than what's served up here.