SWAN SONG
by 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 5th 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 While it appears to be a look back at a naïve and outdated
way of life, it may indeed be the opposite: Rohmer’s final rebuke
of the modern world's spiritual emptiness, 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 17th century. Céladon (Andy Gillet),
a young man of noble birth, has chosen the simple life of a shepherd
and is deeply in love with Astrea (Stéphanie 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 the modern cinematic techniques
of fast cuts, hand-held camerawork, 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 Céladon 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, but
is rescued before drowning by the nymph Galathea (Veronique Réymond)
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, Léonide (Cécile 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 picture
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 the 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 thrilling (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 filmmaking,
Rohmer has exquisitely accomplished and to which The Romance of
Astrea and Céladon places a final exclamation point.
©2009 Howard Schumann
CineScene
