Dir: Eric Rohmer France /Spain/Italy 2007. 109mins
There are two Eric Rohmers. The more popular is the detached comic observer of modern emotional dilemmas, the maker of the Moral Comedies and Four Seasons series. The other is a sometimes forbidding experimental contriver of historical and literary dramas, such as Perceval le Gallois, La Marquise d'O and The Lady and the Duke. Rohmer's new feature belongs in the latter camp and shows the veteran taking a perversely abstruse stance that may mystify even his hardcore admirers.

Based on a seventeenth-century novel more noted in literary histories than actually read, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon is a recherche exploration of an archaic literary form, the pastoral romance. Pointedly out of synch with cinematic fashion, this eccentric project will strike many viewers as arcane, even academic. Yet it is executed with Rohmer's typical sober poise, and its surprising sexual thematics make it an object of considerable fascination. Sheer oddity will limit exports to faithful Rohmer markets, but after its inclusion in competition at Venice, festivals will welcome it as a bold statement from one of Europe 's last surviving doyens of auteur cinema.

The film's source is L'Astree, a novel by Honore d'Urfe, published between 1607 and 1627 and running in some editions to 5000 pages. Rohmer extracts a concise narrative, concerning the troubled courtship between young shepherdess Astrea (de Crayencour) and her beloved swain Celadon (Gillet). The setting is ancient Gaul, imagined as an idyllic landscape populated by innocent rurals, aristocratic nymphs and wise druids. At the start, Astrea chides Celadon after he, for the noblest of reasons, is seen flirting with another girl at a rural festival. A despairing Celadon throws himself in the nearest river, but is rescued by nymph Galathea (Reymond), who happens to be passing.

She and her handmaidens carry him to Galathea's castle, where the nymph falls for his androgynous beauty. Celadon decamps but is loath to return home, and hides out in the woods. His eventual reunion with Astrea - thanks to a spot of cross-dressing - comes about with help from kindly druid Adamas (Renko).

The sight of all these florally-strewn maidens and strapping youths in floppy straw hats initially strikes the viewer as absurd, but Rohmer very consciously exploits the story's preciousness and its anachronism. The film's fifth-century Gaul is really, as the opening titles point out, a fantasy land imagined by seventeenth-century French society, and it's this ambivalent vision that the film evokes. Rohmer makes us very aware that we are really watching present-day actors performing a sort of ritual among real French landscapes. In other words, the film demands to be seen as a conceptual piece.

But the film also has a powerfully sexual undercurrent, fascinatingly at odds with its imaginary age of child-like, pre-sexual purity. Reymond's statuesque Galathea is a drop-dead gorgeous amazon, she and her attendants turning Celadon's head with off-the-shoulder dresses that flop revealingly with every other breath. As Celadon, the square-jawed Gillet has an androgynous beauty that comes into its own in the finale, when disguised in dress and pigtails, he embarks on a friendship with Astrea that gets close to sapphic before his true identity is revealed.

But the film is nowhere near as stylistically striking as, say, Perceval le Gallois, nor as notable a departure as Rohmer's last film, the sombre Triple Agent. The visual textures too are a little more muted than is satisfying, and stylised acting - running the gamut from stiff to flamboyant - isn't always easy to swallow. Nevertheless, Astrea and Celadon shows that the old master, though working in a decidedly minor key, is still capable of flouting convention in a major fashion.

Rohmer has often alluded to classic literary texts in his modern-day stories, and in his latest film, he's essentially returning to the original source of French romantic narrative. In many ways, this story - with its misunderstandings, deferrals and very Rohmeresque happy ending - is not that different from his Tales of the Four Seasons.

As well as being an elegant, if studiedly small-scale landscape film, the film is also texturally rich. A treasure trove for semiologists, the narrative is strewn with texts - recitations, inscriptions, poems engraved on tree trunks - which characters pause to read, interpret and debate. The pastoral codes of love are discussed - notably in Celadon's argument with a cynical troubadour - and a lengthy theological digression has Adamas explaining the difference between the Roman pantheon and a three-named Gallic divinity, manifestly d'Urfe's Christian treatise on the Holy Trinity.

Screenplay
Eric Rohmer
From the novel L'Astree by Honore d'Urfe
Production companies
Rezo Production
Les Films du Losange
Alta Films Produccion
BIM

International sales
Rezo Films
(33) 1 42 46 46 30

Producers
Françoise Etchegaray
Philippe Liegeois
Jean-Michel Rey

Cinematography
Diane Baratier

Editor
Mary Stephen

Costume design
Pierre-Jean Larroque
Eric Rohmer

Music
Jean-Louis Valero

Main cast
Andy Gillet
Stephanie de Crayencour
Cecile Cassel
Veronique Reymond
Serge Renko

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