Céline Sciamma

A painter on an island in Brittany is hired to make a young woman's wedding portrait in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and most of the film is the two of them looking at each other. Sciamma gives looking the weight other films give plot. A ten-year-old is taken for a boy by the girl next door in Tomboy and spends a whole summer as Mickaël; a teenager in Water Lilies joins the synchronised swimming team to get near the girl she cannot stop watching. No adult arrives to explain any of it and the score mostly stays out of the way. You watch a glance land and know what it cost the person who risked it.

Signature

• The gaze as the event of the scene, reciprocal and never voyeuristic.
• Adolescence taken seriously on its own terms.
• Sparse or absent score, so a look has to carry the scene.
• Adults mostly off screen; the peer group is the whole world.