amrixte pdil mgerdimiaag moving image land art E
The third film – and perhaps the wildcard, for its sheer
oddity – comes from the venerable Eric Rohmer, Rivette’s
contemporary in the nouvelle vague. Best known for his
thematically linked modern-day Moral Tales (1963–72) and Tales
of Four Seasons (1990–8), Rohmer has intermittently explored
the past, in experimental versions of Kleist (La Marquise d’O,
1976) and Chrétien de Troyes (the lavishly Brechtian Perceval le
Gallois, 1978) and recently in the discreetly CGI-laced French
Revolution story L’Anglaise et le Duc (2001).
Rohmer’s new film returns to a low-budget mode of no-
frills realism, to subtly confounding effect. Les Amours d’Astrée
et de Céladon (The Romance of Astrea and Celadon) is based on
Honoré d’Urfé’s sprawling seventeenth-century pastoral novel
L’Astrée. The setting is an imaginary, idealised version of fifth-
century Gaul, a world inhabited by swains and shepherdesses,
wise druids and aristocratic nymphs. The film chronicles the
sentimental woes of country virgin Astrea and her beloved
Celadon, who, as the story starts, throws himself in a river after
she accuses him of infidelity. Celadon is rescued by the nymph
Galatea, who falls for him, but he leaves her castle to wander the
forest, and is only reunited with his beloved by disguising himself
as a bashful maiden.
It’s a story calculated to seem ludicrous to modern
viewers, especially given Andy Gillet’s hulking gaucheness in
drag as Celadon – although the playful cross-dressing is no
sillier than Shakespeare’s. But Rohmer expressly plays on the
alien and archaic nature of the drama by alerting us at the start
that his film is a twenty-first-century staging of an eighteenth-
The carriages, salons and other contained settings of century fantasy of a distant past that never was. His nymphs
the start are gradually replaced by larger, stormier tableaux: a in their diaphanous gowns and his strapping youths in their
duel, a windblown Normandy coast and the North African flowered straw hats essentially inhabit three eras at once: we
desert, where Vellini and Ryno make tortured love in front of the realise that Rohmer is saluting an ancestor and that his own
burning pyre of their dead daughter (a vision of excess teetering present-day stories of romantic misunderstanding are directly
on the brink of melodramatic kitsch, yet entirely in keeping with descended from d’Urfé’s pastoral, whose characters are antique
the codes of the mid-nineteenth-century Romantic novel). counterparts of Rohmer’s contemporary bourgeois lovelorn.
Setting exactitude in clothes and decor against self- While Rohmer has a reputation for indirection, Astrée
conscious anachronism and cinematic allusion, Breillat plays et Céladon can hold its own with Breillat’s and Rivette’s films
havoc with our assumptions. She retains much of Barbey’s as a historical study of libido: the supermodel-like nymphs are
language, which tells us that Vellini is ugly and past her prime, embodiments of pure sexuality, while Celadon, in his maidenly
while the camera shows us the torridly glamorous Argento. This attire, suddenly becomes an object of both straight and sapphic
gulf in perception illuminates the European nineteenth century’s desire. Perhaps it’s no accident that cross-dressing plays such a
fear of female sexual potency, a fear tainted also with a racism part in all three films – even Rivette’s, where one of Armand’s
that has inescapable contemporary resonance (as well as a accomplices dresses as a nun for the kidnap attempt. While
dangerous ‘flamenca’, Vellini is considered a touch ‘moricaude’, the traditional costume epic dresses up to assure us that it’s
Moorish). speaking only about the past, the genre represented by these
Argento’s own status as art cinema’s reigning alternative films – a drama truly concerned with historical modes of being
vamp allows Breillat to load her Vellini with a history of Romantic – adopts formal attire to talk seriously about the past, while
femmes fatales, cinematic and literary, from Mérimée’s Carmen gesturing indirectly but with equal seriousness at the sexual and
(1845) to Marlene Dietrich in von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a social codes of today. Under their period drag, these films offer
Woman (1935). Vellini’s costumes make her a walking repertoire utterly contemporary drama.
of female perversity, from her rakish men’s suits – a historically
specific dash of George Sand – to her costume-party getup as Ne Touchez Pas la Hache is released on 28 December and
the devil, worn with flamboyant boredom. A series of cameos La Vieille Maîtresse on 25 April. Les Amours d’Astrée et de
by former Breillat lead actresses make it clear that, rather than a Céladon will be released in 2008
safe sidestep into a more decorous genre, Une Vieille Maîtresse
ranks alongside the director’s other trangressive investigations.
Historical pedants, of course, may question whether some of the
sexual positions depicted had yet reached Europe in the 1850s.
Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon, 2007 (dir Eric rohmer)
artreview 94
Mixed Media_moving image.indd 94 5/12/07 12:48:00
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