Placement and Payoff in Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Placement and Payoff in creative storytelling in a concept that places an idea in the viewer’s head and sticks it there until a notable point later in the plot where the idea is re-referenced in a new or more meaningful way. One of my favorite examples of this concept is in the French film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2020)
{spoilers ahead}
There is a scene in Portrait of a Lady on Fire that alludes to the separation of the two main characters and love interests, Marianne and Heloise.
In the scene in question, Heloise is reading out loud to Marianne and their friend Sophie. The passage she is reading is the end of the greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, where Orpheus is attempting to lead Eurydice’s soul back to the land of the living, on the one condition that he cannot turn to look at her until they reach the surface of the underworld. When almost there, Orpheus turns around, and Eurydice’s soul is whisked back to the underworld. Sophie hates this ending, and thinks that if Orpheus really cared about her, he would have been able to resist looking, Marianne reflects that maybe Orpheus chose to look back, thus choosing the memory of her instead of her life, but Heloise says that maybe it was Eurydice herself who called him to turn around.
Between this point and the end of the film, Marianne sees a “ghost” in the hallways of Heloise’s family house whenever she is walking alone. The apparition is assumed to be the ghost of Heloise’s recently deceased sister, who jumped from the cliffside to avoid marriage to the man that Heloise is now engaged to. Every time Marianne turns to look at this spirit, a woman in a white dress, she vanishes back into the darkness.
The day that Marianne is meant to leave Heloise’s family home, Heloise is taken aside by her mother before Marianne gets to say goodbye, by the time Marianne finally gets to see Heloise, Heloise is already in her wedding dress. Marianne freezes, hugs her briefly and runs down the back staircase with her belongings. Before she can get to the door, Heloise calls, “Turn around.”
The audience then realizes that the apparition in white from before was Heloise in her wedding dress the whole time, a representation of Marianne's conscience knowing that there would come a time that she would turn around to look at Heloise for the last time before having to give her up.
