The Romance of Astrea and Celadon.

"[Claude] Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two [more tomorrow] and [Eric] Rohmer's The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, both opening this week (after local premieres at the last New York Film Festival), are quintessential works, even though both are adaptations," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "While Rohmer takes on an 'unfilmable' classic text, Chabrol is an enthusiastic tabloidiste.... The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, a film which Rohmer has suggested will be his last, is a costume pageant that serenely conflates two - or perhaps three - historical periods. The source is Honoré d'Urfé's 17th-century pastoral romance, itself set in an imagined fifth-century Gaul; the feel, however, is oddly contemporary.... The movie's gravity has the effect of raising Rohmer's career-long concerns to cosmic heights."

Updated through 8/15.

"[E]ven though I much prefer Mr Rohmer's forays in the contemporary world from very oblique vantage points, I find his period spirituality very genuine, as if he is searching in the past for the roots of his intense identification with the trials and torments of his most memorable characters, particularly his gallery of beautiful and articulately opinionated women, unequaled in world cinema," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

"[T]he movie has all the elements of a final testament even as it displays all the charming freshness of a first movie, or a home movie," writes Dan Callahan at the House Next Door:

The last scene is a triumph of Catholic sensuality over sense, and it's hard to imagine a lovelier, more lyrically intense last moment to end a career on. Audiences might laugh at parts of The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, and perhaps the more acute of them will be able to make a case against this ode to romantic fidelity ("It's not realistic! There have never been men like Celadon! I'd rather laugh and booze it up and have sex with Hylas!") But Rohmer has always created a wholly convincing moral world of his own. If our own world cannot live up to it, or bears no resemblance to it, then that's our failure, not his.

"If the connections between this detached, dreamy fable and Mr Rohmer's refined contemporary examinations of young love in Six Moral Tales are obvious, the characters in The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, pretty as they are, are historical phantoms with little flesh-and-blood substance," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "There are hugs and kisses galore but little actual desire." The film's "view of love is the far-sighted perspective of a die-hard moralist gazing at the foolish world from an Olympian altitude, or perhaps from another planet."

"Rohmer's 5th-century-set story can be enjoyed for its own sake, but it also means to present basic, universal romantic conflicts—similar to those examined in Allegory of Love, CS Lewis's 'study in medieval tradition' that traced the complications humans experience back to their cultural origins," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "This almost mythological approach gives Astrea and Celadon startling relevance."

David Fear, writing in Time Out New York, finds it "goes from mere bad choice to embarrassing clunker. While the director has never had a problem finding a pulse within historical pageantry (see Perceval or The Lady and the Duke), the book’s 5th-century landscape of nymphs, druids and lute-playing roustabouts is an ill fit for Rohmer’s strengths. Community-college theater troupes have rendered broad burlesques with more skill."

"It's a film so embarrassingly quaint it's crying out for a parody called Not Another Medieval Movie," finds Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine.

At New York's Anthology Film Archives for a week starting tonight.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice and New York.

Update, 8/15: "Since the emergence of the French New Wave in the late 50s, Rohmer has been making sly, observant social-romantic comedies (Claire's Knee, My Night at Maud's, Pauline at the Beach) that are easy to watch but a lot less easy to categorize," writes Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. "You can read Astrea and Celadon as not merely a farewell to one individual's filmmaking career but a farewell to cinema itself and to the modern society that produced it."

Posted by dwhudson at August 14, 2008 12:48 PM