YMMV / Portrait of a Lady on Fire

• Awesome Music: "La Jeune Fille en Feu" by Para One, the song that features in the bonfire scene, and one half of the film's extremely sparse score. It starts off as an unexpected and almost ominous drone of women vocalizing before blooming into a near-ethereal chorus of voices, and in a film that had, until that point, used absolutely no soundtrack, the effect is incredible.
  • Considering the inspiration behind the song, the effect truly is transcendent!
• Award Snub:
  • Many were disappointed that France didn't select this movie as its submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, opting for Les Misérables instead, despite this receiving more acclaim.
  • Nonetheless, the film was eligible for other categories besides Best International Feature Film. In particular, some felt that Céline Sciamma should have received a directing nomination, and the film should've received nods for its acting performances and cinematography.
  • The film lost all but one (cinematography) of its ten nominations at the César Awards. That the Best Director award that Sciamma was up for was given to Roman Polański (who is still wanted by the American justice system for the sexual assault of a minor) was egregious to many, and resulted in lead actress Adèle Haenel immediately leaving the ceremony in protest (alongside Sciamma, the show’s host Florence Foresti, and fellow Portrait lead actress Noémie Merlant) and making global headlines as a result.
• Memetic Mutation: The press junket for the film saw lead actresses Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant giving numerous interviews in America speaking English; however, as it is not their first language and they hadn't fully mastered it at the time, this led to some innocent lapses in comprehension that caught on like wildfire among the film's fandom.
  • In multiple interviews, Merlant used "womans" instead of "women" believing it to be the right plural term, and fans ran with it so much that both Merlant and Haenel acknowledged it, with Merlant joking about it in various livestreams and Haenel nodding to it during an interview.
  • In this interview, when asked where she was when she learned she got her part in the film, Merlant forgets the word "bathtub" and asks Haenel to translate it from its French equivalent "baignoire". Haenel says the word, but gives the U in it an "ooh" sound instead of an "uh" sound, essentially turning it into "bathtube". The combination of Haenel's straight-faced confidence saying it and Merlant's confusion afterwards turned the moment into comedy gold.

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