Portrait of a Lady on Fire is intricately silent: and it’s a movie where the silence is eloquent. Writer and director Céline Sciamma crafts a story of women’s desire and devotion that manages to be both gorgeously tender and stunningly, technically precise.

The premise makes it clear from the outset how impossible this desire should be in the logic of the women’s world. Héloïse’s (Adèle Haenel) older sister, promised to an unseen Italian nobleman, has recently committed suicide by throwing herself off the cliffs around her family’s island manor house. But in eighteenth-century France, that’s hardly an obstacle to the arranged marriage: Héloïse is pulled out of the convent where she had confined herself in order to be substituted for the bride—provided her sudden fiancé likes the likeness of her that Héloïse’s family sends to Italy. Enter Marianne (Noémie Merlant): fiery and direct, bohemian and intense, a portrait artist with a career on the rise.

Héloïse accepts this shift with the self-obliterating patience of a person who knows full well the limits of their agency. She isn’t seen as a person, but as a prospect—a limitation she pulls back from in the few ways she can, like refusing to pose for the first portrait artist her mother, La Comtesse (Valeria Golino), assigns her. Marianne is then taken on incognito as a companion, hired to paint Héloïse in secret, from memory and sketches. Also isolated in the island manor with them is a young servant, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), who’s recently discovered she’s pregnant.

The bonds between these three characters is the heart of the movie. A slow-burn romance between Héloïse and Marianne runs like a powder trail through the beautifully crafted shots. Marianne’s gaze dictates our audience view of the story, both in the sense of Marianne’s desire and her painterly focus. The two help Sophie with her abortion and then care for her as she recovers, their lives melding closer in the vacuum of any social interference. The unspoken and unspeakable intimacy among them unfolds with a beauty very rarely captured on film.

The incredible technical precision of this movie makes its heart shine all the more vividly: The sound design—keeping the audience in the same natural diegetic soundscape as the characters—is one smart move. Visually, faces are covered and uncovered, obscured and changed, remembered and recaptured as the women see themselves and one another differently. Other technical choices are more subtle: for instance, when Marianne paints or examines her own paintings, the canvas takes up the whole of the frame. It becomes its own imaginary space, plucked out of the physical reality of the film’s world. Marianne’s vision is allowed to be as separate and as independent as her life on the island. All of these experiences are contained within some kind of frame—temporal in the sense of both the movie’s runtime and the short span of days in which the plot unfolds, or geographic as within the space of the canvas or the privacy of the island. Sciamma is an expert at echoing parallels, creating a series of meaningful mirrors within the film that bloom and expand with every viewing. 

The final scene is a devastating counterpoint to the pristine, diegetic silence of the women’s world. The shot slowly zooms in from a longshot to a close-up of Héloïse, overcome by an orchestra’s swelling rendition of music meaningful to her and Marianne. The patient intensity of this long take is mesmerizing. The full weight of Héloïse’s, and by extension Marianne’s, closeted passion is allowed to be fully present and visible in a final, private moment. Nothing between the two women has faded in the years since their time on the island; nothing has really been lost, although in a pragmatic sense everything has. That devotion is all the more devastating because we know Marianne and Héloïse will never see each other again.

The movie doesn’t pretend at queer love overcoming societal constraints or even hint that the women believe it to be possible. The gentle, unspoken ending of their affair is implicit in its beginning. But remarkably, Sciamma leaves the viewer with a sense of powerful, undampened devotion despite all the circumstances of the women’s lives. There are aspects of themselves that are preserved and precious, even if the frame in which those feelings can be experienced openly is fleeting.

Alison Lanier is a Boston-based writer and editor who works at MIT and is one of the founders of Mortar Magazine. She has read more Batman comics than you.