Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon (2007) - film review

Gaul in the 5th Century.  Astrée is a beautiful young shepherdess who is devotedly in love with Céladon, a handsome young shepherd.  But when she imagines that her lover has been unfaithful to her, Astrée tells him that their love is at an end.  Disconsolate at this rejection, Céladon throws himself into the river, but is saved from drowning by a party of nymphs.  They take him to their castle and tell him that he must never leave them, yet Céladon longs to be with the one he loves.  But how can he return to Astrée, when he has sworn never to appear in her sight again...?

Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon has been presented as Eric Rohmer’s final film.  If this is so, it is an appropriate close to the career of the oldest and arguably greatest of the surviving New Wave directors - a tale of love in a bucolic setting that feels like the purist distillation of Rohmer’s entire oeuvre.  It may not be in the league of this director’s previous great films, but it is a film with immense charm and is a fitting, and typically individualistic, way for Eric Rohmer to sign off.  

Based on an epic 17th century novel by Honoré d’Urfé, the film recounts a romantic fable set in fifth Century Gaul.  Rohmer adheres as close as he can to the spirit and form of the original novel and, as a result, the film has a beguiling unreality that sets it apart from most of modern cinema.  It isn’t so much a piece of drama as an alluring visual poem in which the protagonists are not real people but the dream-like abstractions that we find in fairy tales and myths.  

To some, the film will appear shallow and precious.  The stylised, almost theatrical performances do jar somewhat but, on reflection, are appropriate for the kind of film that Rohmer had in mind.  This is not a realist drama but a piece of visual poetry, comparable only with Rohmer’s earlier Perceval le Gallois (1978), one that celebrates the splendour of romantic love and the beauty of the natural world.  The antithesis of today’s commercial cinema, which seems increasingly obsessed with showing us the worst of humanity, Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon is a refreshing reminder that there are artists who can still see wonder and beauty in the world and convey this in their work.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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