While watching Céline Sciamma’s masterful Portrait of a Lady on Fire last week, I couldn’t help but think of another lady: 2017’s Lady Bird. There, writer/director Greta Gerwig painted an indelible portrait of a high-school senior often at odds with her hometown and what she perceived to be as a limited, boxed-in future. As part of a deep lunge of an attempt to get accepted to an East Coast school she definitely can’t afford, she shows the head nun at her private school her admissions essay.
“It is clear that you love Sacramento,” the nun says. (She’s spent most of the movie complaining about it)
“I guess I pay attention,” Lady Bird says.
And then the nun offers a line I still, three years later, think about at least once a week: “Don’t you think they’re the same thing? Love and attention?”
For the past year or so, I’ve been trying to get back into drawing and improving my skills as a writer who draws. I recognized everything Marianne was doing – the contouring, the mixture of colors, the way she held her instruments. But what stood out to me the most is the most simple and important of all: attention. The way she leans and sneaks in looks at her subject in Héloïse, running behind a rock to sketch out her hands or struggling to remember the shape of her ears.
It is astonishing how much our brain can misremember. If I told you “draw a car” you’d likely draw something with two wheels, a door, some kind of window. It wouldn’t really look like a car, though. I’d look like what you think a car looks like. The lack of attention breaks the reality. Now say you were – and this is exactly something I did, to astonishing results – to look at a picture of a car, or even better, look at a car from side profile in a parking lot. Really look at it and notice where the curves go. Where the door creases begin and end. Just how much space is between the tire and the frame of the car. They seem like minor details, but each of these minor details you can notice and approximate will have a substantial impact on your next drawing. You’ll get ever closer to the real thing.
It’s no mistake that Marianne’s love for Héloïse increases the more she pays attention. She cannot separate her attention to her subject from her love for her subject. They become one and the same. And the most hurtful thing that could be said to her comes when Heloise tells her she doesn’t even see herself, or worse, Marianne in the portrait. It’s chasing reality, but not the truth. And really, how painful is it to her from someone you are crushing on that you think you know them, but you really don’t?
At one point, as they talk about when they may or may not have fallen in love with each other, they each list off the different things they do when they’re feeling different ways. We expect this from Marianne, after all. She is the artist. It’s literally her job to pay attention, to make this secret portrait without Héloïse knowing. But what we don’t expect is Heloise to be as incisive and perceptive about Marianne. She’s been paying attention, even as she’s been an avoidant subject to paint. It’s an exhilarating turn.
The last shot in the film is one for the ages. The camera does not move. We just see Héloïse’s face for what seems like an eternity. It’s our portrait, a gift from the filmmaker, to allow us to see just how much we’ve been paying attention to Heloise and the connection she’s found herself in. And if we continue to pay attention, we’ll see it’s not just sadness that comes over her; it’s everything. Every laugh, every tear, every dash towards the sea. All the highs and lows and waves in-between. All we want in life is to be painted a portrait by someone who truly understands us, even if they are gazing agonizingly, appreciatively, from afar.
