Steinesongo Too many fans seem to be blown away

Boobirt Stylish but barely mediocre overall

ChampDavSlim The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

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.

Andres Salama This was Eric Rohmer's last movie, which he made in 2007 at 87 (he would die three years later). He decided to close his distinguished career by filming a famous French pastoral novel of the 1600s, considered unfilmable by those who have read it. Rohmer, who before becoming a director was a professor of French Literature, has always been one of the most literary of all directors. The action takes place in an anachronistic, fantastic Gaul among a rural community of shepherds. The silly, absurd plot (which is never played for laughs) has the shepherd Celadon fled the village after his love Astrea suspects him of "making merry" with another shepherdess during a party there. Astrea is led to believe that he drowned in the river while fleeing, and she mourns him madly, but he has actually been rescued by a community of nymphs, who live in a renaissance-style castle and whose leader is mad with Celadon and doesn't let him leave the place (in the film, every woman is madly in love with Celadon). One of the nymphs eventually gets the head druid involved (who sputters platitudes and new age like nonsense and is played by Serge Renko, who was the Soviet spy in Triple Agent - Rohmer's previous, great film, sadly little known). Not very profound, and a bit of a gimmick, this bucolic, languid film is pleasant to watch. The young, little known beautiful actors, who always say their lines in perfectly enunciated French, help.

MartinHafer Apparently Astrea and Celadon are in love but cannot publicly display it since their families hate each other. So, Celadon pretends to love another--and ultimately Astrea incorrectly assumes he is being unfaithful to her. So what does this knucklehead do? He tosses himself into the river when she confronts him and tells him never to talk to her again. She naturally assumes he drowned in the river and sulks through most of the film. However, and this is really odd, he does not reveal to her that he's alive--after all, she DID tell him never to speak to her again AND he was the perfect lover and could not violate this command. So, to get around this command, later he is introduced to her as the druid priest's daughter--and she/he and Astrea become close friends and confidantes.I understand that director Eric Rohmer is a beloved New Wave director and I understand that the reviews for his final film, "The Romance of Astrea and Celadon", are mostly very positive here on IMDb. However, despite knowing I SHOULD love his work and this film, try as I might, I just don't get this adoration. Sure, I have enjoyed a few of Rohmer's films but by and large, I just can't help but feel perplexed by his fans. And, of all the films of Rohmer's I have seen, I think that, to me, "The Romance of Astrea and Celadon" is perhaps the least enjoyable. The plot made little sense, the plot device of having Celadon dress as a woman made even less sense and the film just seemed incredibly talky and dull. If this is about what true love is supposed to be about, then I guess I know absolutely nothing about love---I just thought Celedon was a bit of a yutz and his actions seemed less like the ideal lover and more like a complete fool.So was there anything I liked about the film? The cinematography was nice and the director did create an amazingly beautiful and sensual picture. But the plot made no sense, the story quite slow and the film bored me to tears. I just don't seem to see in this film what everyone else sees.

Chris Knipp Eighty-seven now, the indefatigable Rohmer still explores his obsession with young lovers. In this his declared swan song, he follows the theme via the pastoral romance of Honoré d'Urfé, penned in seventeenth-century France and set in the Forez plain in fifth-century Gaul. This is a classic star-crossed lovers tale with a happy ending that involves some cross-dressing by the pretty Celadon (Andy Gillet). He thinks his girlfriend Astrea (Stephanie Crayencour) has forbidden him to come into her sight, so he poses as the daughter of a high-born Druid priest. Though too tall, as cross-dressers often are, the striking Gillet is certainly beautiful enough to pose as a girl (Crayencour, though appealing, can hardly compete for looks—till she bares a breast, one area where Andy can't compete). When Celadon, as a "she," gets so friendly with Astrea they start kissing passionately early one morning in front of some other girls, there's some titillating gender-bending going on that gives this otherwise odd and dry piece some contemporary interest.As opening texts explain, the film was made in another region because the Forez plain is "urbanized" and otherwise ruined today. The mostly young cast wears costumes designed to evoke the seventeenth-century conception of what d'Urfe's antique (and largely mythical) shepherds and priests wore. Just as Rohmer's contemporary young lovers in his "Moral Tales" have little to distract them from their flirtations and love-debates, d'Urfé's characters are those of an ancient pastoral tradition who never get their hands dirty and spend their times in quiet, paintable pursuits like dancing, singing, or frolicking in the grass discussing the ideals of courtly love. Rohmer uses this idealized world as a more detached version of his usual emotional landscape. However, this film is more similar to the artificial and somehow un-Rohmer-esquire late efforts 'The Lady and the Duke' and 'Triple Agent' than to his really charming and characteristic work.In the beginning of the story, the lovers have apparently had a spat. Celadon allows Astrea to see him dancing and flirting with another girl at a dance. Later he insists it was only a "pretense," but Astrea jumps to the conclusion her boyfriend is a philanderer and is so angry she banishes him forever from her sight. His reaction is to throw himself into the river. While Astrea and her girlfriends go looking, he's washed up on shore at some distance, nearly drowned. He's rescued and nurtured back to waking health by an upper-class nymph (Veronique Reymond) who lives in a (presumably seventeenth-century) castle.A druid priest (Serge Renko) and his niece Leonide (Cecile Cassel) supervise Celadon after he flees from the nymph's clutches. He pouts in a kind of pastoral tepee for a while, and then is persuaded to put on women's clothes so he can be close to his beloved. One wonders if Rohmer hadn't lost control of the casting when we see the over-acting, annoying Rodolphe Pauly as Hylas, a troubadour who opposes the prevailing platonic tradition in favor of free love with multiple partners. Pauly completely breaks the heightened, elegant tone and introduces an amateurish note, which is the more dangerous since the simplicity of the outdoor shooting already risks evoking some French YouTube skit. Things liven up considerably when Celadon is in drag, but by that time Rohmer will have lost the sympathy of many viewers.Adapting seventeenth-century pastoral tales to the screen may be a far-fetched enterprise at best, but there must be better methods than this. Paradoxically, though the pastoral ideal is about purity and simplicity, recapturing it is likely to require more elaborate methods than this. The Sofia Coppola of 'Marie Antoinette' might have managed it—and that film does have a pastoral interlude, though not "pure" pastoral but aristocrats camping it up as shepherds and shepherdesses. Rohmer's bare-bones methods worked well for most of his career because the people and their conversations were interesting enough in themselves; the intensity of his own interest made them so. Such methods don't work so well here. The talk in 'The Romance of Astrea and Celadon' is too stilted and dry most of the way to hold much interest. For dyed-in-the-wool Rohmer fans, of course, this mature work is nonetheless required viewing. Newcomers as usual had best go back to 'My Night at Maude's' and 'Claire's Knee' to understand the perennial interest of this quintessentially French filmmaker.