“Titanic is the hugest success, and it’s because it’s totally queer. Leonardo DiCaprio was totally androgynous at the time. DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were both not known — not stars — so there was no power dynamic between them. Like, if you look at the sex scene in Titanic […] he’s the one who’s being totally fragile and insecure. I think it was a huge success because it’s a love story with equality and with emancipation.
I think the movies are in dialogue. I thought a lot about Titanic because it’s also the present of a love story and the memory of a love story. A successful love story should not be about eternal possession. No, it should be about emancipation. And it is an emancipation story, because maybe [Kate Winslet’s character in Titanic] lost this love, but we see her being free and riding horses and wearing pants. It’s all about emancipation.
The success of a love story is not about how long it lasts. It’s not about ending your life together. Him dying is tragic, but it’s not the end of the story. In equality, there is emancipation.”
In the film commentary, while the last scene was happening, Céline was reading the script at the same time. So I translated the whole text.
(A HUGE thank you to @bereavingfor making those GIFs and helping me out with the text. You’re amazing.)
Here is the translated script of that final Portrait of a Lady on Fire scene:
“I saw her one last time.”
THEATER. INTERIOR. NIGHT.
MARIANNE makes her way among the spectators on the balcony of an Italian-style theater. She sits down and watches the room fill up in the hubbub of voices amplified by the acoustics of the auditorium. She distinguishes a familiar silhouette which progresses in the opposite balcony. The face slips away and Marianne does not take her eyes off it until it turns. It’s HÉLOÏSE. She squeezes between the occupied armchairs and the empty armchairs until she reaches the end of the balcony like the edge of a precipice. She’s sitting there. There’s nothing between her and the stage. Her eyes are riveted on this horizon. She does not look at the room as the conversations go out one after the other as by mutual agreement.
“She didn’t see me.”
The theater suddenly fell silent before the stormy violins begin their first movement.
(Music begins)
Like a restrained breath torn by a well-known staccato, the one of the inaugural notes from Vivaldi’s Summer presto. HÉLOÏSE displays a first disturbance in the face of the first bars of this long-awaited piece. You get imperceptibly close to her face during the 3 minutes of the movement.
This face experiences the dramatic deployment of music as it hears it, pierced by the generous rise of it. There is everything: there is surprise, elation, a beating heart, waiting, melancholy, concentration, the red which goes up to the cheeks, the memory, the sadness, and the breathing which becomes deeper.
All the attitudes of a woman that we knew well, and that we liked to watch. That we loved, period. But there are also things that we didn’t know about her and that are being discovered. Maybe because they are new, like this wrinkle around the eye. Maybe they are things that we hadn’t been able to see and that remained to be understood.
When the piece reaches its exalted final, HÉLOÏSE reveals the last and most alive of all her faces.”
“Adèle had only one instruction: to finish on an inhalation.”
Does anyone else remember the story about that poor lesbian who came out to her mother and her mother cried and said “it’s all that damn Keira Knightley’s fault, I knew I shouldn’t have let you watch pride and prejudice as a child” because I’m really feeling that now
