In the film commentary, while the last scene was happening, CĂ©line was reading the script at the same time. So I translated the whole text.
(A HUGE thank you to @bereaving for making those GIFs and helping me out with the text. Youâre amazing.)
Here is the translated script of that final Portrait of a Lady on Fire scene:
âI saw her one last time.â
THEATER. INTERIOR. NIGHT.
MARIANNE makes her way among the spectators on the balcony of an Italian-style theater. She sits down and watches the room fill up in the hubbub of voices amplified by the acoustics of the auditorium. She distinguishes a familiar silhouette which progresses in the opposite balcony. The face slips away and Marianne does not take her eyes off it until it turns. Itâs HĂLOĂSE. She squeezes between the occupied armchairs and the empty armchairs until she reaches the end of the balcony like the edge of a precipice. Sheâs sitting there. Thereâs nothing between her and the stage. Her eyes are riveted on this horizon. She does not look at the room as the conversations go out one after the other as by mutual agreement.
âShe didnât see me.â
The theater suddenly fell silent before the stormy violins begin their first movement.
Like a restrained breath torn by a well-known staccato, the one of the inaugural notes from Vivaldiâs Summer presto. HĂLOĂSE displays a first disturbance in the face of the first bars of this long-awaited piece. You get imperceptibly close to her face during the 3 minutes of the movement.
This face experiences the dramatic deployment of music as it hears it, pierced by the generous rise of it. There is everything: there is surprise, elation, a beating heart, waiting, melancholy, concentration, the red which goes up to the cheeks, the memory, the sadness, and the breathing which becomes deeper.
All the attitudes of a woman that we knew well, and that we loved to look at. That we loved, period. But there are also things that we didnât know about her and that are being discovered. Maybe because they are new, like this wrinkle around the eye. Maybe they are things that we hadnât been able to see and that remained to be understood.
When the piece reaches its exalted final, HĂLOĂSE reveals the last and most alive of all her faces.â
âAdĂšle had only one instruction: to finish on an inhalation.â
Click here to see more translated parts of the DVD commentary
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