This movie is easily the most gorgeous movie I have seen in years, if not ever, and one of the most thrilling, subtle, and touching as well.

Director Celine Sciammia has made a powerful film about the love women can have for one another,  lesbian and otherwise. And also about how they support each other.

It’s the first love story I can recall set in a world without a man anywhere in sight (except walk shots of fops in wigs). It is a women’s story in every sense of the world, so pure and beautiful it is shocking.

It left me reeling (Maria, too).

I am quickly running out of superlatives for this movie, superbly elegant comes to mind, and the script is brilliant – and elegant also – as well.

In a sense, Sciamma has created a   moving utopia that imagines a world free of men; a world in which women bring their own rarely seen and uplifting view of love and the circumstances women have found themselves in forever.

The film is a feminist statement without dogma, fantasy, rage, or illusion. Sciamma avoids drama, lecture, and grievance and takes us deep into the hearts of two women who fall in love, and who also intuitively help other women – especially Sophie, a young household servant.

Some of the scenes are so inventive and affecting they just blew my mind.

There is not a divisive or controversial moment in this movie, yet it makes a statement that can’t be missed. She strips love to it’s simplest and most authentic self.

The movie takes place in the late 18th century, sometime before the French Revolution. Marianna (Noemie Merlant), a professional artist, has accepted a secret commission to go to Brittany and paint Heloise (Adele Haenel). The finished painting is to be sent to Heloise’s future husband, a Milanese nobleman.

Moving the story to an old-world was a masterstroke, it frees the story of the contemporary baggage and angst of women struggling to finally be free and equal.

The most striking thing about this once-in-a-lifetime movie is the realization that love from a woman’s point of view is so different from stories involving men or from Hollywood’s corporatized view of everything, including love.

Every shot seems more beautiful than the one before it.

Heloise and her husband have never met, and she seems deeply opposed to the match. It is also clear she lives in a world where women have few, if any, rights or prospects outside of marriage. Heloise has defied her mother and refused to sit for a portrait.

Noemi plans to deceive her, a deception that doesn’t last long.

Heloise and Naomi fall in love. This movie is ardent and poetic and passionate, and philosophical. And it is one of the most beautiful films you will ever see. As you can perhaps sense, I can’t recommend it enough.