https://believermag.com/art-by-women-about-women-making-art-about-women/

“Even though these women knew their lives were marked out in advance, they experienced something else,” Sciamma says of her characters. “Their bodies become their own when they are allowed to relax, when vigilance wanes, when there is no longer the gaze of protocol, when they are alone.” It is this aloneness that gives the film’s depiction of love its realness, its maturity. One must know oneself in order to be alone in love, to be differentiated in love. Otherwise, oneself and one’s love can be enmeshed and defined only in relief: against the disapproving parents, the addiction, the mobster husband, the distance, the restrictive religiosity of late-eighteenth-century France, the future husband in Milan. The drama of Portrait of a Lady on Fire doesn’t lie in whether or not the lovers will resist their fates or survive apart. They will separate and they will survive. The story is their collaboration in the creative acts of loving and of remembering.

I still like my love stories as I like my love, though now that means unadorned by manipulative soundtracks, shorn of the male gaze, repudiating hierarchy, and recognizing autonomy as a condition for true love. When I finally met someone who shared this aesthetic, both in her art and her love, of course I asked her to marry me.