Grief and the Historical Sapphic in Contemporary Film
Photo by Mikayla LoBasso
Within the last three years we have been gifted three films which feature historical women-loving-women relationships: The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos 2018), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma 2019) and most recently Ammonite (Francis Lee 2020). All three have been extremely high profile, winning awards and with a cast queer dreams are made of: Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz, Adèle Haenel, Saoirse Ronan… And all three will leave you with an overwhelming sense of grief and loss.
So what is it that connects these beautiful but devastating films? I’ll start with the endings.
[SPOILER WARNING]
In both Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Ammonite the relationships end with a movement of the sapphic couple away from the wild, private space of the beaches (which, ironically, shelter them) and into the hetero heart of society as represented by art galleries, opera houses, and other such public institutions. Away from the brutal cliffs and windswept coastlines where each film predominantly unrolls – spaces literally and symbolically on the edge of society – their love is shown to go under, unable to resist the cruel pressures of social convention. We are left with heartbreak and separation, the only real evidence that each romance ever happened being its preservation through art: the sketches and paintings made – and of course, the film itself.
The closing scenes of Portrait of a Lady on Fire see Marianne (Noémie Merlant) once again gazing at a portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), but instead of it being a private act of looking as it has been for most of the film, now the portrait is in a gallery setting, crowded among hundreds of other paintings, and includes a young girl – presumably Héloïse’s daughter. The presence of the child further illustrates the way that Héloïse has been subsumed into mainstream heterosexual culture, the tragedy of her separation from Marianne being the tragedy of the imprisoning expectations of a woman’s role in western patriarchal society. But the subtle symbol of resistance to this destiny is the page number that the book in this uncanny portrait of Héloïse is open at – page 28, the page of her copy of Orpheus and Eurydice upon which Marianne sketched herself in an intimate moment the two women shared. A memento mori of their love remains in this faint painterly communication, linked also by the fact that in this final portrait Héloïse is wearing white, just as she was the last time Marianne saw her in person - when she was in her wedding dress, ghost-like on the staircase of the mansion in Brittany; a queered Eurydice. This nod to their love affair could be interpreted as a tragic tenderness, a refusal to forget, but it is also the cause of the despair and what makes the ending so haunted and haunting. After all, as Susan Sontag wrote, ‘life is a movie, death is a photograph’ – or in this case, death is a portrait; the death of what could have been if not for the punishment of queer relationships by society.
Similarly in Ammonite the film ends with Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) travelling away from the isolated English coastal village of Lyme Regis which fostered her slow-burning and passionate relationship with the married Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan) to a major metropolitan hub – in this case London – and finding herself in the British Museum. There is a shot where Mary stands in front of a wall of portraits of celebrated white male figures and perfectly obscures the man’s portrait with her own figure: the symbolism here is powerful in the way that it creates a sense of the looming spectre of a man’s world and the walls it has built between the possibility of her finding happiness with Charlotte, as her husband and the rigid wider structures of society are standing in the way. But for this brief moment in the film, it is Mary who obstructs, who literally stands in the way. It cannot last however. This sapphic couple cannot survive in 1800s London, and so the relationship joins the ranks of the ghosts, leaving only the memories - the tender sketch made by Mary of Charlotte in bed, the mirror that Charlotte decorated with shells, the fossils and rocks they collected together. The contrast between the durability of the ‘Ammonite’ fossils which the film is named for and which Mary Anning had dedicated her life’s work to excavating and the fragility of the love they briefly share makes the ending even more heartbreaking, as we witness how briefly the flame can be kindled for.
The final scene of The Favourite in typical Yorgos Lanthimos style leaves us at a loss without being sure exactly why. Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) is shown to force Abigail (Emma Stone) to her knees down before her to rub her gout-ridden legs in a position resembling that of sexual servitude. This goes on for just a moment too long to be comfortable, until the screen becomes overlaid and eventually fully obscured by the images of the queen’s pet rabbits. These rabbits are the surrogate children of the Queen, in lieu of her 17 deceased children. Lanthimos, by ending the film with this kaleidoscopic final image of the rabbits, plunges us into the literal rabbit hole of Queen Anne’s mind, and the multi-layered shot captures the fathomless depths of grief - not just her grief for her children, but for the deterioration of her relationship with her lover Lady Marlborough (Rachel Weisz) who has been effectively usurped by Abigail. On top of this, the queen’s health is portrayed to be deteriorating hugely by the end of the film, so there is a pre-emptive sense of mourning for her own death, a life and legacy in ruins. The film, despite its dark comedy and frequently humorous moments, is not so much about love between women but female grief - the unique grief of a woman who has lost too many children through either miscarriage or childhood death for their sanity to still be entirely intact. But the moment in the film that the Queen realises that Abigail is not what she seems is when she sees her crush one of her rabbits - one of her children - under her foot. This is literally the breaking point, as the loss of her children combines with the loss of Lady Marlborough in an overpowering grief which is portrayed via the absurdity of that final shot, which represents a kind of fracturing of the queer queen’s reality.
The death of children is also a grief being carried in Ammonite. For example, Mary Anning’s mother has a collection of figurines which she grows angry about Charlotte touching, as they represent each of her dead children in the same way that Queen Anne’s rabbits are attempts at child-replacements. Charlotte herself first appears in the film as someone in mourning, dressed all in black and struggling with depression due to the loss of a child. Over the course of the film her healing process is shown to be intertwined with the developing relationship with Mary Anning, a testament to the unique power of female bonds as in comparison to the dryness of Charlotte’s marriage the love shared with Mary is portrayed as a kind of rebirth and a lease of freedom; they go wild swimming, they kiss in the rough ocean. One of the most striking and seductive moments in the film is when Charlotte eventually changes out her black mourning clothes for an incredible green dress, a dress very similar to the one worn in Portrait of a Lady on Fire by Héloïse. The symbolism of the colour green suggests fertility, spring, nature and the hope of a new life. But this kind of lasting hope is not possible, for either Marianne and Héloïse or Mary and Charlotte - it can only flicker for a moment, a candle, a wave.
In comparison to the unwanted deaths of babies in The Favourite and Ammonite, in Portrait of a Lady on Fire there is a key subplot based around the attempts of the serving girl Sophie to self-induce an abortion. She tries to carry this out in secret due to the shame and stigma associated with the procedure - particularly in the later half of 18th century France when the film is set - but Marianne and Héloïse help her. The intimate all-female dynamic of many of these scenes culminates in Marianne sketching what would have been considered an extremely transgressive subject - Sophie’s abortion. There is a coven-like quality to the relationship between the three women, especially in light of the fact that in the middle ages they would most likely have been burned as witches for such activities - terminating an unwnated pregnancy, sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, the ‘craft’ of painting… In the scene which takes places around a bonfire where many of the local women are collected, singing, this coven-like atmosphere is made even more apparent, and brought to a climax when Héloïse’s dress catches fire while she and Marianne are sharing an exchange which also burns with the intensity of the sexual tension in their gazes. The contrast between the green dress with the complementary colour red of the flames, of Marianne’s dress, of blood, brings their relationship into fiery life, while also presenting the dangers of this kind of love - the possibility of getting burnt, the tragic unsustainability of their passion.
The symbolism of burning can either be positive or negative - either a burning passion, or a pain which is all-consuming. When something is burnt it is also destroyed, as demonstrated in The Favourite when Abigail burns the letters to Queen Anne written by Lady Marlborough. As Sarah Ross puts it, many queer histories have also been burned historically, erased from the narrative, in the same way that Mary Anning has been left out of the history books for being both a woman and queer - an outsider. The emergence in recent years of this distinct kind of film genre focusing upon (and sensationally glamorising) historical sapphic relationships is encouraging to an extent as it shows a demand for queer women’s histories such as these to be unearthed and remembered. However, why must these portrayals always be so essentially tragic and unhappy? In his essay ‘Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness’ Kevin Brazil puts this well: ‘What does it mean for queer life that its stories of happiness will remain forever silent?’. It is a daunting question, and one which - unless we’re careful - will remain unanswered, as silent as the archive, or the grave. Meanwhile we must satisfy ourselves with the collection of shame and griefs that constitute so much of queer representations in film; because after all what is grief but a form of love with no object.