You’re Hot, Then You’re Cold: Queering Nature in “Call Me By Your Name” and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”
Celiné Sciamma and Luca Guadagnino’s queer romantic epics use fire and water to capture the heavy grief and volatile desire of two sweeping, clandestine love affairs.
“Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot” —Mr. Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg), Call Me By Your Name
First love is both a scorching and quenching force. It consumes you whole like an inferno, igniting something deep in your soul. Then, when it’s over, it knocks you down like a wave, leaving you flailing in an ocean of tears and pain until you wash back onto shore, searching for that feeling all over again. It’s no wonder, then, that Celiné Sciamma’s enchanting period drama “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and Luca Guadagnino’s coming-of-age masterpiece “Call Me By Your Name” use fire and water as recurring motifs to articulate the overwhelming push and pull of a fleeting romance—and in the particular context of queerness, the internal strains that come with it.
In “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” fire appears as an obvious but effective metaphor for the intoxicating courtship between lonely French painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and her subject Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). Although fire is primarily depicted as a source of warmth and domestic comfort throughout the film, Sciamma codes it with other complex meanings. During one nighttime scene, Marianne hovers a candle over an old, faceless portrait of Héloïse before accidentally setting it aflame. Here, fire evokes the fickleness of Marianne’s developing love for Héloïse, suggesting a deep-seated fear that their love will spark just as quickly as it will extinguish. Because this story also takes place at the turn of the 18th century, the stakes are even higher, making the forbidden pursuit of their love all the more rapturous and intense.
As the flames of Marianne and Héloïse’s budding union are gradually stoked, fire evolves into a symbol of quiet liberation for both women. Their affection for one another is emblazoned through subtle yet evocative gestures: sharing a smoke from a tobacco pipe, reading and discussing the tragedy of Eurydice and Orpheus next to a calming hearth, and in one major standout scene, exchanging a gaze across a bonfire while a chorus of ladies chants a song with lyrics that translate to “they come fly.” In these instances, fire not only illustrates the escalation of Marianne and Héloïse’s emotional intimacy, but also their attempt at releasing themselves from the binds of a gender-restrictive, heteronormative society.
Marianne and Héloïse’s eventual consummation comes directly after this scene, further reinforcing this notion that the untamable yearning for a connection, whether covert or explicit, pushes us to be our truest, most vulnerable selves. By spending as much of their precious time together as possible, Marianne and Héloïse kindle an intellectual, spiritual, and sexual light in one another, and even when fire is not directly in the foreground, it remains stitched into their world, lingering in the periphery like an airborne ember.
Where “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” portrays fire as a thematic and aesthetic device, “Call Me By Your Name” accomplishes the same with water. Although more contemporary than “Portrait”—it’s set nearly 200 years later in the Italian countryside—Guadagnino’s narrative maintains a similar anxiety about the queer romance at its center, using water to convey the turbulent, free-flowing romance between restless 17-year-old Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) and his father’s American protegé Oliver (Armie Hammer).
At the start of the film, water is represented as a lustful escape for Elio. He ventures to the river for several late-night sexual exploits with an attractive young woman named Marzia (Esther Garrel). But as Elio develops an infatuation with Oliver, water acts as a literal and figurative spring for both his budding sexual fluidity and his inner turmoil over this new identity. First, Elio negs Oliver in his backyard pool, leaving both men angry with one another and frustrated with the unspoken rigid gender roles holding them back. Later on, though, Elio and Oliver reconcile when they venture with Elio’s archeologist father Sami (Michael Stuhlbarg) to the sea to unearth an artifact—a broken, muscular statue of a young man, no less. A few scenes following this, Elio and Oliver visit the town square, where Elio indirectly confesses his attraction to Oliver. They then swim and splash around in an ice-cold shallow pond before sharing an erotic kiss on a bed of grass.
Like with the fire in “Portrait,” the water here lulls Elio into an emotional pendulum that swings between self-loathing and curiosity, giving him the agency to explore this realm while simultaneously limiting his ability to act on his impulses. This thematic duality brings to mind “Moonlight,” another beloved, popular, award-winning queer film that pitted its protagonist Chiron (Alex Hibbert/Ashton Sanders/Trevante Rhodes) against the tides of poverty and homophobia in order for him to find his way in the world as a closeted gay man. In both movies, water allows Chiron and Elio to cleanse themselves of the profound shame they feel for simply wanting to love and to be loved.
Water also plays an important role in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” just as fire does in “Call Me By Your Name,” but each element takes on opposite connotations. In “Portrait,” the body of water next to Héloïse’s estate represents a place of sadness and emotional fragility. It’s where Héloïse’s sister’s mangled body was found, where Héloïse swims without knowing how to, and where Marianne runs to embrace Héloïse when she knows that their romance is coming to a close. During the iconic ending of “Call Me By Your Name,” Elio sits and cries in front of a fireplace, reminiscing on his time with Oliver and lamenting the fact that Oliver has already moved on. In flipping the subtext of water and fire, each film contends that first loves aren’t built to last, but that the memory of those experiences can be preserved through the forces of nature that surround us.
As openly gay filmmakers themselves, Sciamma and Guadagnino understand the significance of constructing small yet profound queer utopias for these characters—and more broadly, for moviegoers who can identify with them. They are able to offer audiences glimpses into a life where same-sex couples can acknowledge but also evade social and historical prejudice, a life where queer romance can end but not necessarily through an exploitative tragedy, and perhaps most importantly, a life where nature empowers queer people to transcend the constraints of the physical world so that they can inhabit a newer, more radical reality.