#absolutereality

Maybe I'm projecting my own little gay self on Marianne here....but I think she's attracted to Heloise from the beginning. This isn't a new feeling for her I think, so she is able to compartmentalize it. Until, that is, Heloise starts showing interest (see "I felt your absense" and "she talks about you.") After these scenes the camera cuts to Marianne and she has the ultimate oh shit face.

This seems like genuine lesbian experience Celine would have been trying to portray. As a lesbian today (or in the past), you repress your feelings until this small miracle happens and the other women turns out to also be attracted to you lol.

My very tired eyes just transmitted these words to my tired brain--”Portrait of a Lady on Fire not only understands the depths of first love, but also the yearning and repressed desire that comes with love that has so often been considered unworthy or illegitimate.“--and combined with what you just said, I simply have to smile.

I mean, Céline very purposefully leaves a lot open so that you can fill in the experience you yourself need to have/see. She isn’t very specific about the details of Marianne’s past (or Heloise’s) so that pretty much any reading is valid. All we know is that Marianne has definitely had at least one sexual affair, with a man, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t also experienced desire for women and/or had a roll in the hay with a woman. There’s markedly no gay panic (or same-sex-attraction-motivated hesitation) in the film and so I know many of us are gonna fill in the details: Marianne (and possibly Heloise) has had prior brushes with same-sex attraction. (To be able to identify what they’re feeling, to act on that attraction without much hesitation...)

I love that someone else is still obsessed and unlayering this as much as I am! It’s interesting that we see Heloise’s progression towards agency through her apparitions. Marianne sees her twice before and seemingly turns around unprompted, perhaps reinforcing her belief that she is the one with the choice. It’s only the final (and real?) time that we and Marianne discover it was Heloise who says turn around and thereby controls her own fate.

Oh my GOODNESS, that honestly hadn’t even occurred to me, that the apparitions themselves are recreation of the Orpheus and Eurydice moment, that Marianne senses “something” behind her and, without being able to resist, turns.

I’d only been thinking of the apparitions as hauntings--the present/knowledge of the story’s end contaminating the past/memory--as previews of the final moment that Marianne remembers, not as rehashes/rehearsals/reproductions of Orpheus and Eurydice explicitly.