For over a week, I’ve struggled with a 7-way tie (including my “other” choice of Call Me by Your Name). Finally, I found my tie-breaker: Years ago, I won my Filmspotting tee shirt from a Brief Encounter Massacre Theater. So relieved to have found some way to tip the scales —I don’t know how the rest of you could possibly make a decision! Toughest poll ever.
Andrew Howell - 5 days ago
I could be wrong, but only one plays with the idea of whether or not it's worth the tragic loss / having the free will to choose NOT to have the pain (but at the expense of not experiencing the love). It's one thing to experience love and loss, it's another to choose whether or not to experience it at all - I can't imagine anything more bittersweet.
Daniel - 5 days ago
If we're talking about the best, yeah, it's probably Casablanca or Brief Encounter. But, your honor, I’d like to plead guilty to recency bias—because over the holidays, I watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and my heart hasn’t been the same since. In fact, I was spurred to leave this comment after putting on I Will Wait for You for the dozenth time since seeing the film.
Thinking about going away to war and leaving my girlfriend just so I can really get it.
Just kidding, Amanda—I love you.
danny hensel - 6 days ago
Gotta be The Umbrellas of Cherbourg for me. Brief Encounter comes close, but the Demy movie is so singular and its melancholy is ever-present and so rich
Bryce Tenbarge - 6 days ago
These are all incredible. To me, the flashback, "what might have been" montage in LaLa Land was what separated it for me as a bittersweet romance. But what a rich font this is for great movies? This list is incredible.
Bob Loves Filmspotting - 1 week ago
Once.
"Make art! Make art!"
Peter Koetters, Pasadena CA - 2 weeks ago
I adore every one of these films. There isn't a wrong choice on the list, but The Umbrellas of Cherbourg broke my heart the moment in the film when that train left the station and, like the characters in the film, I have never recovered. I have never watched it a second time because I want to remember that feeling just as it was. Umbrellas has to be my pick.
I can’t believe you forced me to choose between two of my favorite movies of all time—Eternal Sunshine and Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I just stared at the poll for like a minute and then basically eeny-meeny-miny-mo’d to land on one of them. Cruel.
rmp - 2 weeks ago
Flawless job on this poll by Sam. I love how the focus stays on situations where both parties recognize, while deciding to end things, what they will be losing and the regrets they will have to live with after, rather than on external circumstances or tragedies being the cause. That's the key thing that makes it specifically a bittersweet romance for me. I voted In The Mood For Love. One might have included Happy Together and made it a double entry. But I think you could also consider situations where the relationship is continued with full knowledge that an external event is going to end it sooner rather than later, and so they're prebooking both their happiness and their grief. Arrival and My Old Ass are kind of like that, although in both films the foreknowledge is limited to one member of the couple.
Scott G - 2 weeks ago
Can't find fault with any of these poll choices, but in the "Other" category, I'd like to offer a few titles from a very specialized sub-subgenre, which I call The Tragic Sci-fi Romance. These are films that focus on a central couple, feature a science fiction element of some sort in the story, and conclude on a less-than-happy note. James Cameron's "The Terminator" from 1984 fits these criteria nicely, as do "Twelve Monkeys" from Terry Gilliam, "Dark City" from Alex Proyas, "The Fountain" from Darren Aronofsky, "Deja Vu" from Tony Scott, "The Time Traveler's Wife" from Robert Schwentke, and of course Steven Soderbergh's 2002 remake of "Solaris". I find that the addition of a mind-bending sci-fi dilemma raises the stakes considerably, as well as the poignancy of the couple's eventual loss. As it happens, I cried my eyes out during a few of these, which is not a common occurrence for me.
Laura Riordan - 2 weeks ago
Making me choose between Brief Encounter, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is just cruel! I went with Umbrellas but it may keep me up at night…
Alex “Mitch & Murray” Annear - 2 weeks ago
Simply the most difficult poll I’ve seen. I guess bittersweet romance might be the best film genre!
For something so difficult, you have to go “favorite” vs. “best”. That means Eternal Sunshine, La La Land, or Portrait of a Lady on Fire for me. In the end, my gut says (somehow)… La La Land! Just such emotion. The highs are so very high, so cinematic and dazzling with two proper movie stars at the height of their glamour. Give me La La Land forever, everything else in the incinerator! Lord have mercy on me!
i've navigated away from and back to this poll four different times, and each time, i first spot one option and say "oh, well, no competition, that's the one."
so i don't care if it's not fair, and i don't care if it's not my favorite movie on the list. but if you asked me what my favorite bittersweet romance movie is without providing a list, it would take me almost no time at all to say Once. the last crane shot of Marketa playing the piano alone, with the overlay of the best Original Song win possibly of all time?
i swear i'm not picking it just because one time in New Orleans in 2009, Marketa bummed a clove cigarette from me.
Jerry in Seattle - 2 weeks ago
Yes, agreed this is the most difficult poll you have had. 3 of these choices are in my personal top 10: Umbrellas, Portrait of a Lady on Fire and In the Mood for love. Eternal Sunshine is a top 15 and Casablanca is somewhere near the top for me too. I almost went with other as I typically name Annie Hall as my favorite film of all time and is the funniest bitter-sweet romance by far. But I went with Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which happens to be playing at the Seattle Cinerama this weekend and yes I have tickets, making this the 3rd time I will have seen the film on the big screen. Now, as your 28 Months Later review proved Sam had some nutty opinions in the early years of the show. (I'm on episode 125 in my second sally through the archives.) But my happiest moment in those first couple years was listening to Sam swoon over Umbrellas while Adam was somehow lukewarm to negative. Sorry Adam you were wrong once. Umbrella's is almost perfect but Act I - from the opening credits to Guy's train pulling away may be my favorite 30 minutes in film history. Swoon . . .
Casablanca is a perfect film with a perfect ending, and it's hard not to vote for it. But In the Mood for Love is all of that, too: perfect, shattering and moving, with a perfect ending. Yet there might be no movie where I yearn for a different ending more desperately, wanting some other life for these characters. I can't argue with the ending of Casablanca. And while my head can't argue with the ending of In the Mood for Love, my heart argues every single time. If that doesn't signify the most powerful bittersweet romance, I don't know what does.
Shawn Kelly - 2 weeks ago
This poll is a bittersweet romance! How am I to choose between Casablanca (top 3 all time), Eternal Sunshine (10/10), IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE?! (prob should be the choice) and my ultimate pick Portrait of a Lady on Fire. You'll never hear Vivaldi the same way again.
Trent Robb - 2 weeks ago
Wow. Six of these movies are on my top 200 list. So very hard to pick just one. But then again I can just look at list and pick the highest one. My #33 favorite movie is Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Perfect blend of bitter and sweet.
Rob - 2 weeks ago
Oof... Casablanca is my favorite of all time, but judged just on the bittersweet romance I have to give it to Once. It's such a beautiful partnership that was never going to work out in real life, and we saw that in real life.
Gah! Where's the essential Les Amants du Pont-Neuf?!
Erin Teachman (Los Angeles) - 2 weeks ago
Like the best deeply flawed polls, this question is actually a knot that is quite hard to untie, to disentangle which element leaves the deepest mark - the bitter or the sweet, the tensions or the nature of the resolution? Is Once even bitter? They make beautiful music together, quite literally, that they can't be together romantically might actually be beside the point. "Meet me in Montauk" is seared into my heart forever, but is it truly sweet? Were Joel and Clementine ever going to be a good couple? While reviewing my Letterboxd, I knew, that as much as I loved these movies, I was going with Other, the question was which one? Before Midnight, Far From Heaven, Amour, Carol, Head On, Cold War, Up in the Air, The Lobster, my heart has scars from them all, but then I saw it, and it was a film I only saw because of Filmspotting: Kim Ki-Duk's 3-Iron, the story of a man who slides into empty houses and tries to leave them better than he found them until he meets an abused woman. The scene where she seems to reconcile with her abuser, while he moves in lock step behind him, the over the shoulder kiss, that is something I will always remember. It's a haunting film about the slippery quality of connection in the presence of unwelcome others where no resolution is possible, the bitter and the sweet in permanent tension and that's why I'm slipping it into this poll question.
David C - 2 weeks ago
Well Casablanca and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg are favourites of mine. I have a couple of unpopular opinions on Enternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (it's only fine) and La La Land (it needs to do a lot of work to reach up to fine). Portrait of a Lady on Fire was good. Which leaves me with Once as my vote. The music, the emotion, the wonderful story carry it past my other 2 favorites.
My single most beloved film festival experience was seeing "Once" at the Jacksonville Film Festival in 2007 before most of the rest of the world. I went in cold and came out utterly charmed (and in desperate need to purchase the soundtrack). And as for that bittersweet ending, it's perfect. I wouldn't change a note of it.
Jordan Jurcyk - 2 weeks ago
Even among several other tremendous films, the only reason Casablanca - one of the greatest films ever made and in the conversation for my personal favorite - isn't an obvious slam dunk is because the romance itself is only a piece of what makes it brilliant. I voted for it anyway. The romance is still great. Just thinking about the film fills me with warmth towards movies as an art form.
Jim Campbell - 2 weeks ago
While I really like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Casablanca is easily the winner for me, the eternal romantic. The lost love refound, the hope of a future with her, only to find out she belongs to another with more vehemence than he expected--all of these are part of a recipe for a soul-crushing loss but still with a chance to save her from death. What romantic would not do this in such circumstances!
Of those I've seen, no surprise that Casablanca is my favorite rewatch. But I'm never terrible moved by the lost love. Eternal Sunshine put me through the ringer and, therefore, has my vote.
Holy Toledo, this lineup! Gotta be in the running for best collection of films in one Filmspotting poll. Though all of them are worthy, I went with the David Lean masterwork Brief Encounter, which takes a mere 86 minutes to pack an emotional wallop and feels shockingly modern, both in its writing and filmmaking. There are times when Celia Johnson hits Passion of Joan of Arc-levels of sublime face acting.
Geremy Webne-Behrman - 2 weeks ago
Bravo! This is a genuinely great selection of films. The fact that you already have In the Mood for Love, Once, Casablanca, and (the film I ultimately voted for) Portrait of a Lady on Fire makes this list of films pretty inarguable. In fact if I had to make a revue of five bittersweet romance films to create a proper understanding of the genre it would be made up of those four, plus maybe Her as a fifth to introduce some science fiction into the mix.
Mark Harrell - 2 weeks ago
I’m going to have to go with Blue Valentine here. The outstanding performances from Gosling and Williams really sell you into their budding romance only to really pull every ounce of emotion out of the screenplay and portray the reality of their fading relationship with great nuance and complexity.
The last shot of him walking away down the street is so tender and real and just insanely heartbreaking.
Also, Michelle Williams should just be in every movie because she is so good.
Mark Harrell - 2 weeks ago
I’m going to have to go with Blue Valentine here. The outstanding performances from Gosling and Williams really sell you into their budding romance. They really pull every ounce of emotion out of the screenplay and portray the reality of a fading relationship with great nuance and complexity.
The last shot of him walking away down the street is so tender and real and just insanely heartbreaking.
Also, Michelle Williams should just be in every movie because she is so good.
Of the films you've listed, I'd have to go with Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is one of my favorites. I love the film Once, but the age difference feels odd to call it a bittersweet romance. And Eternal is more of other things than a bittersweet romance. A few other choices I might include in th poll to make it less flawed... Her... Call Me By Your Name... and the Age of Innocence. But if you REALLY want to make it less flawed is to include some horror in the mix... The Others... Let the Right One In... The Shape of Water.
Daniel Swartzman - 2 weeks ago
I teach undergrads. Almost none of them have any idea about Casablanca. (I've asked. They also haven't seen The Matrix!) So, if Casablanca even gets close to number one, I would be surprised.
For over a week, I’ve struggled with a 7-way tie (including my “other” choice of Call Me by Your Name). Finally, I found my tie-breaker: Years ago, I won my Filmspotting tee shirt from a Brief Encounter Massacre Theater. So relieved to have found some way to tip the scales —I don’t know how the rest of you could possibly make a decision! Toughest poll ever.
I could be wrong, but only one plays with the idea of whether or not it's worth the tragic loss / having the free will to choose NOT to have the pain (but at the expense of not experiencing the love). It's one thing to experience love and loss, it's another to choose whether or not to experience it at all - I can't imagine anything more bittersweet.
If we're talking about the best, yeah, it's probably Casablanca or Brief Encounter. But, your honor, I’d like to plead guilty to recency bias—because over the holidays, I watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and my heart hasn’t been the same since. In fact, I was spurred to leave this comment after putting on I Will Wait for You for the dozenth time since seeing the film.
Thinking about going away to war and leaving my girlfriend just so I can really get it.
Just kidding, Amanda—I love you.
Gotta be The Umbrellas of Cherbourg for me. Brief Encounter comes close, but the Demy movie is so singular and its melancholy is ever-present and so rich
These are all incredible. To me, the flashback, "what might have been" montage in LaLa Land was what separated it for me as a bittersweet romance. But what a rich font this is for great movies? This list is incredible.
Once.
"Make art! Make art!"
I adore every one of these films. There isn't a wrong choice on the list, but The Umbrellas of Cherbourg broke my heart the moment in the film when that train left the station and, like the characters in the film, I have never recovered. I have never watched it a second time because I want to remember that feeling just as it was. Umbrellas has to be my pick.
I can’t believe you forced me to choose between two of my favorite movies of all time—Eternal Sunshine and Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I just stared at the poll for like a minute and then basically eeny-meeny-miny-mo’d to land on one of them. Cruel.
Flawless job on this poll by Sam. I love how the focus stays on situations where both parties recognize, while deciding to end things, what they will be losing and the regrets they will have to live with after, rather than on external circumstances or tragedies being the cause. That's the key thing that makes it specifically a bittersweet romance for me. I voted In The Mood For Love. One might have included Happy Together and made it a double entry. But I think you could also consider situations where the relationship is continued with full knowledge that an external event is going to end it sooner rather than later, and so they're prebooking both their happiness and their grief. Arrival and My Old Ass are kind of like that, although in both films the foreknowledge is limited to one member of the couple.
Can't find fault with any of these poll choices, but in the "Other" category, I'd like to offer a few titles from a very specialized sub-subgenre, which I call The Tragic Sci-fi Romance. These are films that focus on a central couple, feature a science fiction element of some sort in the story, and conclude on a less-than-happy note. James Cameron's "The Terminator" from 1984 fits these criteria nicely, as do "Twelve Monkeys" from Terry Gilliam, "Dark City" from Alex Proyas, "The Fountain" from Darren Aronofsky, "Deja Vu" from Tony Scott, "The Time Traveler's Wife" from Robert Schwentke, and of course Steven Soderbergh's 2002 remake of "Solaris". I find that the addition of a mind-bending sci-fi dilemma raises the stakes considerably, as well as the poignancy of the couple's eventual loss. As it happens, I cried my eyes out during a few of these, which is not a common occurrence for me.
Making me choose between Brief Encounter, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is just cruel! I went with Umbrellas but it may keep me up at night…
Simply the most difficult poll I’ve seen. I guess bittersweet romance might be the best film genre!
For something so difficult, you have to go “favorite” vs. “best”. That means Eternal Sunshine, La La Land, or Portrait of a Lady on Fire for me. In the end, my gut says (somehow)… La La Land! Just such emotion. The highs are so very high, so cinematic and dazzling with two proper movie stars at the height of their glamour. Give me La La Land forever, everything else in the incinerator! Lord have mercy on me!
y'all. what fresh hell is this.
i've navigated away from and back to this poll four different times, and each time, i first spot one option and say "oh, well, no competition, that's the one."
so i don't care if it's not fair, and i don't care if it's not my favorite movie on the list. but if you asked me what my favorite bittersweet romance movie is without providing a list, it would take me almost no time at all to say Once. the last crane shot of Marketa playing the piano alone, with the overlay of the best Original Song win possibly of all time?
i swear i'm not picking it just because one time in New Orleans in 2009, Marketa bummed a clove cigarette from me.
Yes, agreed this is the most difficult poll you have had. 3 of these choices are in my personal top 10: Umbrellas, Portrait of a Lady on Fire and In the Mood for love. Eternal Sunshine is a top 15 and Casablanca is somewhere near the top for me too. I almost went with other as I typically name Annie Hall as my favorite film of all time and is the funniest bitter-sweet romance by far. But I went with Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which happens to be playing at the Seattle Cinerama this weekend and yes I have tickets, making this the 3rd time I will have seen the film on the big screen. Now, as your 28 Months Later review proved Sam had some nutty opinions in the early years of the show. (I'm on episode 125 in my second sally through the archives.) But my happiest moment in those first couple years was listening to Sam swoon over Umbrellas while Adam was somehow lukewarm to negative. Sorry Adam you were wrong once. Umbrella's is almost perfect but Act I - from the opening credits to Guy's train pulling away may be my favorite 30 minutes in film history. Swoon . . .
Casablanca is a perfect film with a perfect ending, and it's hard not to vote for it. But In the Mood for Love is all of that, too: perfect, shattering and moving, with a perfect ending. Yet there might be no movie where I yearn for a different ending more desperately, wanting some other life for these characters. I can't argue with the ending of Casablanca. And while my head can't argue with the ending of In the Mood for Love, my heart argues every single time. If that doesn't signify the most powerful bittersweet romance, I don't know what does.
This poll is a bittersweet romance! How am I to choose between Casablanca (top 3 all time), Eternal Sunshine (10/10), IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE?! (prob should be the choice) and my ultimate pick Portrait of a Lady on Fire. You'll never hear Vivaldi the same way again.
Wow. Six of these movies are on my top 200 list. So very hard to pick just one. But then again I can just look at list and pick the highest one. My #33 favorite movie is Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Perfect blend of bitter and sweet.
Oof... Casablanca is my favorite of all time, but judged just on the bittersweet romance I have to give it to Once. It's such a beautiful partnership that was never going to work out in real life, and we saw that in real life.
Gah! Where's the essential Les Amants du Pont-Neuf?!
Like the best deeply flawed polls, this question is actually a knot that is quite hard to untie, to disentangle which element leaves the deepest mark - the bitter or the sweet, the tensions or the nature of the resolution? Is Once even bitter? They make beautiful music together, quite literally, that they can't be together romantically might actually be beside the point. "Meet me in Montauk" is seared into my heart forever, but is it truly sweet? Were Joel and Clementine ever going to be a good couple? While reviewing my Letterboxd, I knew, that as much as I loved these movies, I was going with Other, the question was which one? Before Midnight, Far From Heaven, Amour, Carol, Head On, Cold War, Up in the Air, The Lobster, my heart has scars from them all, but then I saw it, and it was a film I only saw because of Filmspotting: Kim Ki-Duk's 3-Iron, the story of a man who slides into empty houses and tries to leave them better than he found them until he meets an abused woman. The scene where she seems to reconcile with her abuser, while he moves in lock step behind him, the over the shoulder kiss, that is something I will always remember. It's a haunting film about the slippery quality of connection in the presence of unwelcome others where no resolution is possible, the bitter and the sweet in permanent tension and that's why I'm slipping it into this poll question.
Well Casablanca and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg are favourites of mine. I have a couple of unpopular opinions on Enternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (it's only fine) and La La Land (it needs to do a lot of work to reach up to fine). Portrait of a Lady on Fire was good. Which leaves me with Once as my vote. The music, the emotion, the wonderful story carry it past my other 2 favorites.
My single most beloved film festival experience was seeing "Once" at the Jacksonville Film Festival in 2007 before most of the rest of the world. I went in cold and came out utterly charmed (and in desperate need to purchase the soundtrack). And as for that bittersweet ending, it's perfect. I wouldn't change a note of it.
Even among several other tremendous films, the only reason Casablanca - one of the greatest films ever made and in the conversation for my personal favorite - isn't an obvious slam dunk is because the romance itself is only a piece of what makes it brilliant. I voted for it anyway. The romance is still great. Just thinking about the film fills me with warmth towards movies as an art form.
While I really like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Casablanca is easily the winner for me, the eternal romantic. The lost love refound, the hope of a future with her, only to find out she belongs to another with more vehemence than he expected--all of these are part of a recipe for a soul-crushing loss but still with a chance to save her from death. What romantic would not do this in such circumstances!
I didn't realize that Bittersweet Romances was my favorite genre until you put all my favorite movies into one poll.
I can only assume Brief Encounter is so low because people haven't seen it. A lot of great options here, but this is THE longing love movie!
Of those I've seen, no surprise that Casablanca is my favorite rewatch. But I'm never terrible moved by the lost love. Eternal Sunshine put me through the ringer and, therefore, has my vote.
We’ll alway have Paris.
.
.
.
And Casablanca.
Holy Toledo, this lineup! Gotta be in the running for best collection of films in one Filmspotting poll. Though all of them are worthy, I went with the David Lean masterwork Brief Encounter, which takes a mere 86 minutes to pack an emotional wallop and feels shockingly modern, both in its writing and filmmaking. There are times when Celia Johnson hits Passion of Joan of Arc-levels of sublime face acting.
Bravo! This is a genuinely great selection of films. The fact that you already have In the Mood for Love, Once, Casablanca, and (the film I ultimately voted for) Portrait of a Lady on Fire makes this list of films pretty inarguable. In fact if I had to make a revue of five bittersweet romance films to create a proper understanding of the genre it would be made up of those four, plus maybe Her as a fifth to introduce some science fiction into the mix.
I’m going to have to go with Blue Valentine here. The outstanding performances from Gosling and Williams really sell you into their budding romance only to really pull every ounce of emotion out of the screenplay and portray the reality of their fading relationship with great nuance and complexity.
The last shot of him walking away down the street is so tender and real and just insanely heartbreaking.
Also, Michelle Williams should just be in every movie because she is so good.
I’m going to have to go with Blue Valentine here. The outstanding performances from Gosling and Williams really sell you into their budding romance. They really pull every ounce of emotion out of the screenplay and portray the reality of a fading relationship with great nuance and complexity.
The last shot of him walking away down the street is so tender and real and just insanely heartbreaking.
Also, Michelle Williams should just be in every movie because she is so good.
Of the films you've listed, I'd have to go with Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is one of my favorites. I love the film Once, but the age difference feels odd to call it a bittersweet romance. And Eternal is more of other things than a bittersweet romance. A few other choices I might include in th poll to make it less flawed... Her... Call Me By Your Name... and the Age of Innocence. But if you REALLY want to make it less flawed is to include some horror in the mix... The Others... Let the Right One In... The Shape of Water.
I teach undergrads. Almost none of them have any idea about Casablanca. (I've asked. They also haven't seen The Matrix!) So, if Casablanca even gets close to number one, I would be surprised.