Sex scene and unseen: Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Céline Sciamma, 2019)

ABSTRACT Across her body of work, Céline Sciamma demonstrates a persistent and progressive interest in reconfiguring cinematic discourses of desire. The few sex scenes in her oeuvre do not function narratively as straightforward evidence of a character’s desire or the truth of the self. Rather, the director tests out how the reorientation of both conventional and novel sex scenes via visual style and mise en scène might offer opportunities to reorganise their sexuality effects. In Portrait de la jeune fille en feu/Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Sciamma eschews the cinematic conventions of a sex-positive lesbian romance or arthouse film and offers instead an idiosyncratic image of sex that playfully acknowledges, and complexly references, the historical invisibility of lesbian sexuality and its more recent subjection to spectacular regimes of cinematic visibility. Detaching pleasure from the desire that looking everywhere else in the film sustains, Sciamma adopts a queer aesthetic of diffusion and strategic invisibility.