Céline Sciamma

Known for their work both on and off screen, they once dated actress Adèle Haenel, yeah, that Adèle Haenel—critically acclaimed, always bold, never boring. Their relationship? Not the stuff of tabloid scandals, just a low-key connection that eventually came to a chill, mutual ending. No Twitter drama, no cryptic Instagram stories—just two people who respected each other enough to walk away without fireworks. People in the French film scene still talk about it sometimes, probably over overpriced coffee, because you know how gossip lingers. Honestly, it’s kinda refreshing in an industry where “amicable split” usually means “someone’s about to drop a diss track.” Still, the whole thing added a bit of intrigue to their public profiles, like, “Oh, they used to be a thing? Huh, wild.” Goes to show, even in the world of cinema, real-life stories can be just as interesting as the ones onscreen.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire pretty much pulses with this obsession over love—like, not just a love story, but the nitty-gritty of how two people actually fall for each other. You’re watching these women circle each other, step by step, all the messiness and intensity and awkward glances. But it’s not just romance. There’s this whole thing about women artists, women painters, and how their work gets erased or overlooked. The film keeps bouncing between those big themes: falling in love, what love costs you, and what it means to create something lasting when the world keeps trying to forget you. Everything’s built around that—no picking sides, it’s all tangled together. You feel the longing, the fire, the heartbreak, and also the weird power and loneliness of being a woman who wants more from life than what she’s supposed to want. It’s intimate and gutsy and, honestly, kind of revolutionary in how it tells the story.