There are filmmakers who are good at writing intimacy – like Linklater, Koreeda. Another guy called Gaspar Noe simply points and films physical intimacy. And there’s the kind that Barry Jenkins belongs to – they stage the fuck out of it. The emotions in both Moonlight and this film are felt hard because they have this other-worldly touch to how they are filmed. They aren’t conveyed by dialogues alone. The magic is in how these characters behave with the camera. Jenkins allows them to look right into it. In Moonlight, these were almost mundane images, it was a story of one individual, and we got to look into him in his most private moments. But in here we have a couple. Yet it still feels like watching one entity. This is probably because even though we are glimsping into different pairs of eyes, the feelings are the same inside them. These two souls are in love and are sharing the same energy between them. Again, it is magical.

Adding to these passionate visuals, we have lines that are very novelistic. This is an adaptation of a novel, so there you go. The entire film feels like chapters that are being slowly turned over. Pardon my abstraction, I just haven’t been able to approach writing about this film in an objective way. But I can say that if you can’t differentiate between “sincere” and “cheesy”, you might not find a liking to it.