Andres Salama
This was Eric Rohmer's last movie, which he made in 2007 at 87 (he would die three years later). He decided to close his distinguished career by filming a famous French pastoral novel of the 1600s, considered unfilmable by those who have read it. Rohmer, who before becoming a director was a professor of French Literature, has always been one of the most literary of all directors. The action takes place in an anachronistic, fantastic Gaul among a rural community of shepherds. The silly, absurd plot (which is never played for laughs) has the shepherd Celadon fled the village after his love Astrea suspects him of "making merry" with another shepherdess during a party there. Astrea is led to believe that he drowned in the river while fleeing, and she mourns him madly, but he has actually been rescued by a community of nymphs, who live in a renaissance-style castle and whose leader is mad with Celadon and doesn't let him leave the place (in the film, every woman is madly in love with Celadon). One of the nymphs eventually gets the head druid involved (who sputters platitudes and new age like nonsense and is played by Serge Renko, who was the Soviet spy in Triple Agent - Rohmer's previous, great film, sadly little known). Not very profound, and a bit of a gimmick, this bucolic, languid film is pleasant to watch. The young, little known beautiful actors, who always say their lines in perfectly enunciated French, help.
FilmCriticLalitRao
French film "Les Amours D'Astrée Et De Céladon" is absolutely Rohmerian in essence but still relatively easy to follow.It is probably one of the simplest films made by French new wave master Eric Rohmer.Apart from entertaining die hard art cinema admirers,this is a film which would be of great use to students of French language and literature as it makes effective use of simple French language for its lively dialogs full of charm and wit.Eric Rohmer has also created a marvelous feast for eyes as the portrayal of ancient times is artistic,innovative and remarkably honest.One has to appreciate that Rohmer's choice of young actors is brilliant especially Andy Gillet and Stéphanie Crayencour who add an endearing touch to their magnanimous depiction of truthful lovers Céladon and Astrée.Although there is no hint of any kind of inherent eroticism,those who can read between the lines can decipher that this ancient love story is erotic purely out of its own accord. Les amours d'Astrée et de Céladon/The loves of Astrée and of Celadon is a true love story which must be seen by anyone who has ever fallen in love.
Howard Schumann
Eric Rohmer's announced last film, The Romance of Astrea and Céladon, is a costumed period piece based on a 1610 novel by Honoré d'Urfé that imagines what life was like in Fifth century Gaul. It is a work of sublime physical beauty and surprising eroticism that looks both backwards and forwards in time. While it appears to be a look back at a naive and outdated way of life, it may indeed be the opposite - Rohmer's final rebuke of the spiritual emptiness of the modern world, and a preview of a new world struggling to be born. This strange dichotomy is implied by the unusual preface in which a voice announces that the story had to be moved from the Forez plain, "now disfigured by urban blight and conifer plantations, to another part of France whose scenery has retained its wild poetry and bucolic charm." Rohmer transports the viewer to a world of idyllic streams and forests where shepherds dress in the tunics of the Seventeenth century. Celadon (Andy Gillet), a young man of noble birth has chosen the simple life of a shepherd and is deeply in love with Astrea (Stephanie Crayencour), a shepherdess of more modest family lineage. Though the film in lesser hands might have seemed a bit silly, Rohmer's straightforward direction reveals an emotional truth often obscured by modern cinematic techniques of fast cuts, hand-held camera-work, and curse words that are supposed to enhance "realism.At a family gathering, Céladon pretends to be infatuated with Amynthe (Priscilla Galland) to mollify his and Astrea's parents who are bickering, but when Astrea sees him kiss the other woman, she is racked by jealousy and orders Celadon to stay away from her forever "unless I bid you otherwise". In despair, Céladon says "I'll drown myself, at once" and proceeds to jump into the river – at once, but is rescued before drowning by the nymph Galathea (Veronique Reymond) who brings him to her castle and, with the support of two other nymphs, nurses him back to health.When Galathea discovers how attractive he is, however, she wants Céladon for her own pleasure and forbids him to leave the castle but, in the film's first instance of cross-dressing (a notorious Shakespearean plot device), he is smuggled out by another nymph, Leonide (Cecile Cassel) and hides out in the woods. Astrea believes Céladon to be dead and with some regret, forgives him and loves him more than ever, though Céladon refuses to see her out of respect for her word. He begins to rethink his position, however, after being visited by a druid priest (Serge Renko) who hatches a secret scheme to reunite the two lovers.The Romance of Astrea and Céladon is filled with a lightness that is absent from Rohmer's more talky Six Moral Tales and later films in which the characters pontificate at length on the ins and outs of romantic love. His philosophical (and Catholic) bent surfaces, however, in a scene in which Hylas (Rodolphe Pauly), a jester, who is regarded with complete disdain by others, berates the follies of indiscriminate sexuality while Lycidas (Jocelyn Quivrin) promotes love as an ideal that merges two souls into one and the film's robust final sequence demonstrates the extremes one may go to for love.In The Romance of Astrea and Céladon, Rohmer, now in his 87th year, promotes the ideals of commitment, the integrity of one's word, and the poetry of romantic love without its modern day clatter. While these ideals may not seem terribly exciting (one film critic wrote that, "maybe humankind ditched romantic fidelity because it isn't exciting!"), they act to ground us in our noblest aspirations, to remind us of what it means to be human, a task that, in his six decades of film-making, Rohmer has exquisitely accomplished and which The Romance of Astrea and Céladon places a final exclamation point.
allenrogerj
Rohmer has made great films so if he makes a strange or apparently bad film it's wiser to check if it's our expectations that are at fault, not the film. Celadon & Astrae is an odd film and I don't think it's a great film, but I don't think it's a bad one. It has conventions- as all films do- but they aren't conventional conventions so it takes time to adjust to them but it is worth adjusting and accepting the preposterous plot, the formal archaic language and the absurd psychology. There's actually a very Rohmeric film here with beautiful fluid filming and a Rohmeric concern with morality and the actors aren't trapped by the conventions they must act in: Astrea and Celadon's sorrows and joys may be conventional and absurd objectively but they are still moving and the debates are absurd in form but relevant in subject.
