Céline Sciamma

In Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) a painter studies the woman she is painting, and the woman studies her back. For a long stretch that is the whole film, and it holds. Sciamma, who wrote it as well as directed it, does not have anyone say what is passing between Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel; she lets us notice before they do. It is her habit in everything she makes. In Petite Maman (2021) an eight-year-old meets a girl in the woods who has her mother's name and her own face, and the film declines to treat this as a mystery. It is simply what happens next.

She trained at La Fémis, and her first feature, Water Lilies (2007), was written as her graduation project. With Tomboy (2011) and Girlhood (2014) it forms a loose run of coming-of-age films, mostly about girls in the French suburbs, often with young or non-professional casts. Then she moved indoors and back in time. Portrait and Petite Maman are quieter and more controlled, cast with professionals, and some observers miss the rougher edges of the early work. We do not, much. Between her own films she writes for other directors: Being 17 (2016), the stop-motion My Life as a Zucchini (2016), Paris, 13th District (2021) with Jacques Audiard, and The Balconettes (2024).

What she does best is write children without condescension. Her script for Zucchini gives the children in Claude Barras's film interests beyond being unhappy and lets them be blunt about things the adults cannot name. Petite Maman opens in a care home corridor, Nelly saying goodbye to old women who are not her grandmother, and then moves to a car, where the child leans through from the back seat, feeds her mother crisps and puts her arms round her neck. We were undone by that, not ten minutes in, and nothing in the scene asked for it. Sciamma had let a girl be kind and watched.

The control has a cost. Portrait takes so long to let an acquaintance become intimate that the restraint can feel managed rather than felt, and Petite Maman is so exactly built that you can sometimes see the joins. She often does without a conventional score, using silence or a piece of existing music; when she does want a composer it is usually Para One, who has worked with her five times, as Haenel has three and the cinematographer Crystel Fournier three. The silences are where her films do their best work, and where an impatient viewer will give up.

She said of Portrait, "I wanted a love story with equality," and that is the thread through all of it: a painter and her subject, a girl and her mother at eight, given the same weight and the same share of the frame. Her most recent credit is a script for someone else. We would like the next one to be hers.