bigverybadtom This movie is based on a 1610 French novel which takes place in fifth-century Gaul. The story is about the title lovers, children of two feuding families, and at a festival, Celadon tries to hide the romance by pretending to be in love with another girl. Though it was for show, Astrea assumes Celadon's infidelity was genuine and tells him she never wants to see him again, though he threatens to drown himself...and jumps into the river to do so.This causes distress to both the villagers, especially Astrea...but they are unaware that he had been rescued by three nymphs who take him to their castle. One nymph wants Celadon for himself, but another manages to smuggle him out and have him live in the forest, with her druid father coming to help him. But Celadon won't go home because Astrea ordered her not to see him. The rest of the movie revolves around getting Astrea and Celadon back together, which is much more time-consuming than it should be.The movie is full of elements that hardly evoke what fifth-century Gaul must have been like, including a castle and garden that must have dated from at least a millennium later, overly-refined statuary and writing and such, and the discussions of love and religion have little relevance to the overall story. Worst of all, however, is that the two lovers could have gotten back together without having had to resort to all the rigmarole-hence my review title.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx I had a bad time with the last medieval-set film from Eric Rohmer, Perceval le Gallois, generally because it was shot on sets and I found Fabrice Luchini as Perceval incredibly annoying. Having an interest in the literature of the time I was uncomfortable with the portrayal.So I came to this one with misgivings, but fortunately it allowed some of the source material to breathe. The film is based on a 17th century novel called L'Astrée by Honoré d'Urfé. It is set in 5th Century France and is a romantic fantasy of the times. It seems that all characters are either shepherds, shepherdesses, nymphs or druids. I feel that Rohmer's style is quite inflexible, he shot this movie in squarish 4:3, as usual, whereas I felt the languor of the material, the playful Arcadian tone, the respect for the landscape (that Rohmer professes at the start of the film) required a more horizontal treatment of 2.35:1. Full-screen is what Rohmer typically uses and is good for his conversational films, or portraiture if you will. Here the material begs for something different, think for example of the British romantic painters William Etty and Lord Leighton, of Leighton's The Daphnephoria, Etty's The World Before The Flood, long sensual paintings. Rohmer does however try his best to find scenes that look best under 4:3, for example when Astrea takes her flock to high pasture up a steep meadow, there's no other way the scene should be filmed, it's more a case of Rohmer fitting the world to his aspect ratio though. I think that what works best for Rohmer in nearly all of his other films was a weakness here, the spartan conversational style.Celadon is a prince who has decided to live as a shepherd, having presciently followed Voltaire's advice that working the land is the key to happiness. He is loved by Astrea, a shepherdess. A tragic miscommunication between the two leads to their separation and peregrinations. Along the way we are treated to the usual Rohmerian banter about how love can't be forced, elective affinities, and the rationalisations and sophistries of love that each of the characters own. The main chat is between Hylas and Lycidas. Hylas is the equivalent of the bumble bee, he believes that men are meant to flit like bees from flower to flower, he is a joyful larger-than-life character. Lycidas on the other hand believes in monogamous love (with his beloved Phillis), a fusion of souls and both openly scorn the other, though Lycidas comes off as dour. I'm not convinced the philosophical material is a move forward from his earlier movies such as Pauline a la Plage, but it certainly is presented here with enough charm.The source material is well over 5000 pages long and obviously here we have a massive condensation. You can sense this quite often, for example when Celadon contemplates a painting of Psyche dripping hot wax on the sleeping Cupid. The painting is loaded with context, it's describing a scene from Apuleius' The Golden Ass, the only fully-surviving Latin novel, the whole episode is a rich and dense allegory regarding Platonism and different types of love, it's just skipped over here.The movie definitely is a pleasure to watch for me, despite the extravagance that the tale yearns to be told with, and which is barely present here. I don't think there is any director alive, or any budget that would see full justice done to the story, I think Rohmer succeeded as much as can be expected.

Howard Schumann Eric Rohmer's announced last film, The Romance of Astrea and Céladon, is a costumed period piece based on a 1610 novel by Honoré d'Urfé that imagines what life was like in Fifth century Gaul. It is a work of sublime physical beauty and surprising eroticism that looks both backwards and forwards in time. While it appears to be a look back at a naive and outdated way of life, it may indeed be the opposite - Rohmer's final rebuke of the spiritual emptiness of the modern world, and a preview of a new world struggling to be born. This strange dichotomy is implied by the unusual preface in which a voice announces that the story had to be moved from the Forez plain, "now disfigured by urban blight and conifer plantations, to another part of France whose scenery has retained its wild poetry and bucolic charm." Rohmer transports the viewer to a world of idyllic streams and forests where shepherds dress in the tunics of the Seventeenth century. Celadon (Andy Gillet), a young man of noble birth has chosen the simple life of a shepherd and is deeply in love with Astrea (Stephanie Crayencour), a shepherdess of more modest family lineage. Though the film in lesser hands might have seemed a bit silly, Rohmer's straightforward direction reveals an emotional truth often obscured by modern cinematic techniques of fast cuts, hand-held camera-work, and curse words that are supposed to enhance "realism.At a family gathering, Céladon pretends to be infatuated with Amynthe (Priscilla Galland) to mollify his and Astrea's parents who are bickering, but when Astrea sees him kiss the other woman, she is racked by jealousy and orders Celadon to stay away from her forever "unless I bid you otherwise". In despair, Céladon says "I'll drown myself, at once" and proceeds to jump into the river – at once, but is rescued before drowning by the nymph Galathea (Veronique Reymond) who brings him to her castle and, with the support of two other nymphs, nurses him back to health.When Galathea discovers how attractive he is, however, she wants Céladon for her own pleasure and forbids him to leave the castle but, in the film's first instance of cross-dressing (a notorious Shakespearean plot device), he is smuggled out by another nymph, Leonide (Cecile Cassel) and hides out in the woods. Astrea believes Céladon to be dead and with some regret, forgives him and loves him more than ever, though Céladon refuses to see her out of respect for her word. He begins to rethink his position, however, after being visited by a druid priest (Serge Renko) who hatches a secret scheme to reunite the two lovers.The Romance of Astrea and Céladon is filled with a lightness that is absent from Rohmer's more talky Six Moral Tales and later films in which the characters pontificate at length on the ins and outs of romantic love. His philosophical (and Catholic) bent surfaces, however, in a scene in which Hylas (Rodolphe Pauly), a jester, who is regarded with complete disdain by others, berates the follies of indiscriminate sexuality while Lycidas (Jocelyn Quivrin) promotes love as an ideal that merges two souls into one and the film's robust final sequence demonstrates the extremes one may go to for love.In The Romance of Astrea and Céladon, Rohmer, now in his 87th year, promotes the ideals of commitment, the integrity of one's word, and the poetry of romantic love without its modern day clatter. While these ideals may not seem terribly exciting (one film critic wrote that, "maybe humankind ditched romantic fidelity because it isn't exciting!"), they act to ground us in our noblest aspirations, to remind us of what it means to be human, a task that, in his six decades of film-making, Rohmer has exquisitely accomplished and which The Romance of Astrea and Céladon places a final exclamation point.

michael-schwartz-2 I love Rohmer's films - about people in love who talk too much about being in love - but wasn't sure how I'd take this one. Not to worry. It's the distilled essence of the other films, an abstraction of them. The characters in those films are always less deep than they believe. Part of the pleasure is seeing them brought back to normal humanity. Here the characters start out shallow and stay there. The lovers are lovers and nothing more. Their love is a given. The complications are perfunctory, as is the resolution. In the middle of this shallowness, Rohmer gives us a philosophical conversation that is basically about the Trinity (Druid-style, to be sure) and the oneness of the multiple gods, and another conversation about the oneness of lovers. And then the resolution has Celadon becoming Astrea and then Astrea and Celadon becoming one, so the shallow story becomes a reflection of divinity.I loved the pastoral setting. The countryside is beautiful - flowers in almost every shot - without having its beauty forced on you. The sound is live and dense - human conversation embedded in the natural noise of water and birds. Yet the characters, especially the nymphs, felt something like Rohmer's modern Parisians without seeming alien from their setting. It's a masterful touch.This is not my favorite Rohmer, of course. But it's a wonderful way for him to sum up his career and to say au revoir or even adieu.