Céline Sciamma's PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE is a tale of empowerment, creativity and forbidden passion. And - spoiler alert - apart from two musical moments that play a part in the plot, the film has no music. "I wanted to make music a part of the characters' lives, as a rare, desired, precious, unavailable thing," says Sciamma. "And to put the viewer in the same condition. The film also tells us that art, literature, music and cinema allow us to give full rein to our emotions." It was also the director's initial desire to tell a love story based on equality, not on hierarchies and relationships of power and seduction, but the pure present and pleasure of falling in love. "You've never seen another movie quite like this. In its quiet gaze love becomes art." - Seattle Times. "Though the film sizzles with an erotic heat that grows from an initial repression...[Sciamma's] transfixing film, about the heady experience of an impossible first love, is a timeless work of art." -Rolling Stone
"Your first instinct while watching EMMA may be to lick the screen. This latest adaptation of Jane Austen has been candied up with the sort of palette you see in certain old-fashioned confectionaries." (Manohla Dargis, The New York Times) Director Autumn de Wilde has retrofitted her version of EMMA for modern-age sensibilities. All the familiar elements are here, yet everything has been emphatically embellished. To that end, de Wilde's EMMA follows Austen's heroine and her dogged, often humorously ill-conceived efforts to make a match of her poor friend Harriet. It's a note-perfect cast that "swirls around a woman who with a sharp tongue and a vast imagination invents her world amusingly, foolishly, enduringly."
By request, THE BOWMAKERS returns this weekend for two matinee shows. Joining the filmmakers for a post-film Q&A on Saturday will be PT bowmaker Robert Morrow.
--Rocky