Toronto and NYFF preview. Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon.

"Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon is a Rohmerian delight, another ritualized romance (highly mannered behavior, poetic language) played out in a naturalistic pastoral setting (an unblemished slice of French countryside around the River Lignon)," writes Jim Emerson. "It's all an elaborate game of appearances, deceptions, seductions and betrayals - about what is seen or not seen, what is said or not said, and how love comes in at the eye, but is sealed with the mouth. The characters - high-born and common-folk; shepherds, shepherdesses, nymphs and druids - intermingle in a realm of symbols and prophecies that is both fleshly and spiritual, earthy and philosophical. It's a moral tale, a comedy, a proverb, and a seasonal story (midsummer, I'd say) that toys enchantingly with the paradoxical nature of love, and the contradictory distinctions between the lover and the beloved."

Updated through 9/25.

"The film's mix of intellect, sensibility and eccentric deadpan goofiness strikes some as insufferably precious; for myself, I came out of the screening giddily refreshed," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny in an excellent entry.

"This is a profoundly strange film, one that could only have been made by a long-standing master of cinema, one in full control of his art and long past worrying about squeezing his stories into convenient little holes," writes Paul Clark at ScreenGrab. "If it's not my favorite film of Toronto so far, it's the one I've thought about the most since I first saw it, and the one I've discussed and argued about most with other festival-goers."

"Great erotic cinema to (ever so gently) knock your socks off: the final reel of the Rohmer film," writes Girish.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice.

Updates, 9/20: "The Romance of Astreé and Céladon is by no means meant to be grimily realistic, but it is unfortunately reminiscent of watching a high school drama club bedeck themselves in flowers and cunning little outfits made from old sheets and head out to the park to rehearse A Midsummer Night's Dream," sighs Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. For her, this one "will prove watchable only to stalwart Rohmer completists."

"It'd be unfair to spoil anything - let it suffice to say that the 'dilemma' here would never occur to anyone in the 21st century. Rohmer's greatest joke is to present it with a straight face, then force the audience to try to take the story's weirder elements - which eventually expand to include seemingly unconscious lesbianism and a cross-dressing fetish - as normative values of the past," writes Vadim Rizov at the Reeler. "Yet Astree isn't just a mindfuck - it's a delightful movie that manages to make hanging out in sheep-littered fields and forests look like the most fun you could possibly have.... [I]t's one of the best films I've seen all year."

Update, 9/21: "[T]he Rohmer picture feels like a true farewell, and as final films go, I can't imagine a more poignant send off," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

Update, 9/22: "In telling a story of love and rapture, Rohmer maintains some of his customary themes, argumentative and digressive explorations of sexuality and movement and the tension that results from declarations of love and fidelity," writes Patrick Z McGavin at Stop Smiling. "It's an exceedingly odd film, a contemporary interpretation of how the 17th century imagined and thought of the distant and unknowable past. Rohmer was always the most culturally conservative of the Nouvelle Vague figures. Even so, his cinema retains a sensual power and gentle eroticism."

Updates, 9/23: "It is rumored that this may be 87-year-old Rohmer's final movie (a decision he affirms in the massive Criterion box set released last year), and if so this is a delightful, accomplished, auteurist mark to end on; fare he well," writes Doug Cummings. "Roger Ebert once accurately described Rohmer as 'a Catholic intellectual who wears his faith lightly, but in all weathers,' and this film contains several lengthy discourses on faith, love, and fidelity, but like the filmmaker's best works it does so with an unfailing eye for physical beauty and the desires of the flesh. It's also increasingly comical in tone, ending on an uplift perfectly rendered and richly deserved."

"At the final, inevitable kiss closes the film I was shocked to realize how subtly Rohmer had built to a rapturous concluding crescendo - I exited the theater beaming like an idiot," writes Jesse Ataide at DVD Verdict. "A delight, and without a doubt my biggest surprise of the festival."

Update, 9/25: "In the interlude between disaster and reconciliation, Rohmer treats the audience to various symposiums on the nature of romantic fidelity, the majority of which stop the film dead in its tracks," writes Akiva Gottlieb at Slant. "Naturally, the filmmaker stacks the deck in favor of his moral conservatism by portraying the story's puckish anti-romantic as a pompous buffoon instead of letting his challenges provide the proper counterbalance, but Astreé and Céladon seems more interested in pursuing a near-utopian vision than giving credence to relativism. In that sense, Rohmer's work here feels a bit too complacent, and the dialogue lacks the intellectual rigor of his best screenplays, My Night at Maud's and Claire's Knee."

Posted by dwhudson at September 18, 2007 10:05 PM