Eric Rohmer says adieu with Astrea and Celadon
By A. S. HAMRAH | September 2, 2008
PICTURE PERFECT? Rohmer, like Godard, finishes his career painting with light. |
| Romance of Astrea and Celadon | Directed by Eric Rohmer | Written by Eric Rohmer based on the Novel by Honoré D’urfé | with Andy Gillet, Stéphanie Crayencour, Cécile Cassel, Véronique Reymond, and Rosette | Koch Lober Films | French | 109 minutes | Museum of Fine Arts: September 5, 7, 10, 12, 12, 17, 18 |
Now 88 years old, Eric Rohmer, a leading light of the French New Wave and a former film critic at Cahiers du cinéma, says Romance ofAstrea and Celadon [Les amours d’Astrée et de Céladon] is his last film. That people who have never seen a Rohmer film might not want to start with this one is a fair warning. Based on a 17th-century novel by Honoré d’Urfé and set in fifth-century-BC Gaul, Astrea and Celadon features a cast of French Renaissance Faire hippie-dippies playing shepherds and shepherdesses, nymphs and druids. It may be a Rohmerian moral tale, but it is far removed from the Parisian world of contemporary amour that Rohmer has been investigating over the past 40 years or so.On the other hand, if you’re in the position to make Rohmer’s last movie the first one you see, do it. That way, when you get around to seeing classic Rohmer films like My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, A Summer’s Tale, or A Winter’s Tale, they will seem very strange, possibly even stranger than Astrea and Celadon. They won’t seem like talky relationship films at all. Under the influence of Astrea and Celadon, you will see them in the context Rohmer intended. They will appear to you as quasi-mystical love stories in which lovers, with a flat intensity, play for high stakes amid a deceptive, fragile calm. Or maybe that’s not your cup of tea either.
They say when a director dies, he becomes a photographer. But what if before he dies he becomes a painter? Astrea and Celadon presents viewers with a number of paintings on classical themes. At the same time, it demonstrates how the cinema transcends painting, furthers its work. The cinematography and the camerawork in this film equal any in Rohmer’s œuvre. We see characters outdoors, from a distance or in Rohmerian medium shots, not large in the frame but not dwarfed by nature. It’s a human perspective we’re not used to anymore.
“I’m alive!” Those are practically the last words of this death-haunted but sun-dappled film by an old man. Astrea and Celadon calls to mind the “Miracle” section of Roberto Rossellini’s L’amore, but without that film’s wink. In fact, this may be the least cynical film ever made, not to mention the most unhip. Here, Rohmer has put a foundation under airy-fairy French castles, and if at times, particularly during a montage of dissolves of lovers’ faces in nature, Astrea and Celadon resembles a feminine-hygiene ad from the 1970s, so what?
Related:
Review: Have Nots, Serf City U.S.A., Nevermind the Bollocks, Bad mothers, More 
- Review: Have Nots, Serf City U.S.A.
Poverty sucks, but buying stuff is awesome, so I have mixed feelings about capitalism.
- Nevermind the Bollocks
This article originally appeared in the January 17, 1978 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
- Bad mothers
It’s often been said that inside every punk-rocker is a hippie scratching to get out.
- Anarchy in Medford
Sitting in on Tufts lecturer Michael T. Fournier’s course “History of Punk Rock,” offered via the university’s Experimental College, one can’t help but think of Johnny Rotten’s famous final words: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
- Regaining Shane
It was 1985 and it was time for a new kind of kick. I did not expect to find it with guys playing tin whistle, banjo, and accordion, and a guy who used to sing for the B-level punk band, the Nips ( nés Nipple Erectors) — that would be the dentally challenged Shane MacGowan.
- Gibby goes techno
Many Bostonians remember the name Gibby Miller.
- Iggy Pop | Préliminaires
Astralwerks (2009)
- The best of times
On Boston Harbor’s Long Island, two miles out in Quincy Bay, the Curley Building stands hulking and decrepit.
- Punks find their inner Americana
Punk might have been swept along, cleaned up, dirtied again, then separated into a million different subgenres created to simplify things when really it only complicated everything.
- Snotty and brilliant
This article originally appeared in the September 16, 1994 issue of the Boston Phoenix .
- Israeli upstarts
The sound of angry Israeli youth mocking the extreme right is growing in volume, so much so that it’s now reaching the US.
- Less
Topics:
Reviews
, Entertainment, Music, Pop and Rock Music, More
, Entertainment, Music, Pop and Rock Music, Punk Rock, Museum of Fine Arts, Roberto Rossellini, Eric Rohmer, Less
