Portrait of a Lady on Fire by Céline Sciamma is a film that proves the gaze is a directorial choice, not a given.

Every film theorist has argued about the male gaze since Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay. Sciamma makes a film in 2019 in which the gaze is explicitly female and explicitly mutual — the painter looks at her subject, the subject looks back, and the looking is both the plot and the theme.

The formal discipline of the film is extraordinary. There is no non-diegetic music until the final sequence, which means when music does arrive, it arrives like a physical event. The palette is restricted. The compositions are precise. The film is using restraint as an expressive tool.

And then the ending, which I won't describe beyond saying it's one of the great uses of a musical performance in cinema, earns every formal choice the film has made. You feel what the character cannot say because the film has spent ninety minutes teaching you to read the space between what is shown and what is withheld.