European Films

Eric Rohmer, the director almost single-handedly responsible for the reputation of French dramas as talky yet intelligent, shows he has lost nothing of his rigour at age 87 with his new – and apparently last – film Les amours d’Astrée et de Céladon (The Romance of Astrea and Celadon). The oldest New Wave director has opted for an earnest adaptation of an early 17th century literary text from Honoré d'Urfé that recounts a story set in 5th century France as imagined in 1607, taking the text and its idealised version of a half-Roman, half-pagan Gaul with a Christian overlay at face value. Played to straight-shooting perfection by a cast of impressive new faces, Les amours d’Astrée et de Céladon was well-received in France upon its commercial release and can look forward to a long life on DVD both at home and elsewhere.

Beautiful Astrée (newcomer Stéphanie de Crayencour) is in love with the handsome shepherd Céladon (Andy Gillet, from Anne Fontaine’s Nouvelle chance) but misinterprets one of his gestures and believes he has cheated on her, which leads to her rejection of him and his subsequent suicide attempt. Astrée then learns the truth and is shocked by his death, but what she does not know is that Céladon did not drown but was saved by three beautiful nymphs who keep him locked in a castle until one of them, Léonide (Cécile Cassel), helps him escape to the forest where is looked after by her and a druid (Serge Renko).

The whole set-up is very much in the tradition of lighter Shakespeare in general and As You Like It in particular, with Céladon later forced to dress up as a woman to be close to Astrée, something Gillet carries of with good humour, playing off his masculine feyness with ease. Like As You Like It – which is also set in a bucolic, mythologised French forest and is almost an exact contemporary of Urfé’s text – the soliloquies and dialogues are grandiloquent but feel completely natural in context ("All the world’s a stage" indeed), mainly because of Rohmer’s trademark sensibility for the flow of the dialogue and his impeccable direction of the actors.

Rohmer himself adapted and distilled the story from Urfé’s 5000-page epos, concentrating on the central romance and its purposefully anachronistic setting (the 5th century as imagined in the 17th century as presented in the 21st century), eliminating many of its asides to create a streamlined, breezy tale that moves at a brisk pace without ever feeling rushed, which would be fatal for a bucolic romance. Though at first sight Les amours d’Astrée et de Céladon may seem like the odd one out in Rohmer’s oeuvre, it is essentially a tale of fidelity, one of the auteur’s pet themes that also surfaces in his contemporary films, from Ma nuit chez Maud (My Night at Maud’s) to Conte d’hiver (A Tale of Winter).

The film’s casual sensuality also feels completely natural, with Marie Dos Santos and Jérôme Pouvaret’s production design and the costumes by Pierre-Jean Larroque and Pu-Laï finding the right tone for the material and the actors gently playing off their own sex appeal without ever seeming to try and always in function of a tale in which a spiritually ideal love seems to take precedence over carnal desires.

The greatest indication that a director is in complete control of his material is when everything seems to be casually in the right place, when all the effort poured into a film seems effortless, which certainly seems to be the case here.

This film was screened as part of the 2007 Venice Film Festival and the 2008 International Film Festival Rotterdam. 

Buy the DVD at: amazon.fr. 

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