"Not everything is fleeting. Some feelings are deep."

🔈 Extraordinary minimalism, told in a scale Sciamma has waited on for years - Céline's genius has been building for a decade and Portrait is her exhale, her 'let it all out' moment - I am actually super curious whether this will be a start to a run of masterpieces for her or if it really is just a magnum opus. I really like her previous three features, love a lot about each one, but her latest jumped not one but two half stars from them films; maximizing her style with one of the best, most memorable, most romantic, most intimate romance stories told this decade.

Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel (previous partner of Sciamma, such an intriguing casting choice) are totally spot on - to call them convincing is a total understatement. The cinematography, well...this was her first film without Crystel Fournier filming - she knew this movie's scale was going to look and feel different, and this...well it's not only her best shot movie but I would say this is my favourite cinematography of the whole year (excluding Refn's show Too Old to Die Young)...seriously. I've always been passionate about Sciamma's visuals and how very new/modern yet timeless they feel, as if they will never age, and her first (hopefully not last) collaboration with Claire Mathon (very clearly a force of nature, see the beautiful Atlantics) is astonishing, and I would even go as far to say the photography in this has already served as a huge inspiration to how I'm currently thinking out my own films. 🎞

🌊 Truly gorgeous cinema, maybe my love for it is indeed clouding me with bias but I just can't see how anybody could not label this one of the best, most important romance films of the 2010s.
🕯 One of those to escape you from everything - hell, even breathing when it comes to those final twenty minutes.