I’m on the train to Paris with my brother and our friend Fiona who plays Nina in our film. She’s flicking through the complimentary magazine when she shows me a picture and says “Forgetting gender, which of these two would you rather be?”

Knowing nothing about the painting they seemed just like lovers. She is lost in pleasure whilst he has dressed hurriedly, his expression shadowed, his thoughts seemingly rattling noisily in the street beyond the window. Clattering towards the French premiere of our film, I felt like them both. One of the demands of the manifesto that governed the creation of our film is that we tour it, joining our audience to share their reshaping of it night after night. By now my mind is out the window, already dressed and wanting to walk the streets of our next idea, but there I am also – still wrapped in the happiness of the moment. The puritan in me finds one position more praiseworthy than the other but I don’t entirely trust this; all the best lessons I’ve learnt from death are about how to live, how to deny denial. To imagine a film finished when it screens is to think a love affair over when you’re dressed. You hurry nothing by putting on your boots.

However what I saw was not the picture as the artist intended or as his audience understood. Painted in 1878 by Henri Gervex it illustrates the denouement of a poem about a man debauched. The figure is Jacques Rolla surveying his own corruption with a final understanding – having blown all his money on the girl Marion, he is about to take poison and die. Considering the picture as Fiona did, genderless, balances the status of the two in a way impossible to those who saw it at the time. The painting drew scandalised crowds, not because of her nudity but because of her clothes piled in the bottom right. 136 years on, I see a man getting dressed too quickly and killing the mood, the original audience saw a woman who has undressed too fast. The careless abandon of the garments spoke not just of the couple’s reckless lust but of her profession as a prostitute. She isn’t an artistic ideal of beauty, shockingly she is a real woman who takes off her clothes.

As narrative the picture is pretty hammy. The poem considers the culpability of the rich man who pays the poor girl for sex but Gervex’s Marion isn’t the pallid abused child of the text but a healthy woman lost in her own senses. This throws the centre of the story onto poor Jacques at the window, the shadow of his pending suicide becomes a last pathetic spurt of nobility, a final resistance to the corrupting influence of her lovely tits. Despite the scandal she is just a fin de siècle manic pixie dream girl. It’s clear that when painting the couple Gervex did not consider Fiona’s question “Forgetting gender, which of these two would you rather be?”