The Romance of Astrea and Celadon
Directed by Eric Rohmer
August 14-20 at Anthology Film Archives
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Directed by Woody Allen
This week we travel from the sublime to the obnoxious through new films by Eric Rohmer and Woody Allen that share the same subject: Love. Rohmer dramatizes philosophy in The Romance of Astrea and Celadon while Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona dabbles in profundity. Rohmer’s love story is a gossamer distillation of a 17th-century novel by Honoré d’Urfé. Its romantic comedy is acted out by pastoral figures: a shepherd and shepherdess interfered with by nymphs and Druids. Allen once again transplants privileged Americans to Europe; two female friends who visit Spain and succumb to Continental sexual license—a Manhattanite’s version of ‘what happens in Europe stays in Europe.’
While Allen’s contemporary characters boast self-consciousness (a throwback to the 1980s vanity of Hannah and Her Sisters), Rohmer’s period film is the one that feels excitingly contemporary. Audaciously—miraculously—The Romance of Astrea and Celadon proposes a more timeless understanding of what it is to love than Allen’s pandering to fashionable cynicism. Peculiarly, depressingly, Vicky Cristina Barcelona’s real subject is the self-deluding subjectivity of bourgeois narcissists who need movies to glamorize their whims and prejudices (thus, receiving an extravagantly laudatory review in The New Yorker). For several decades, the media has praised Woody Allen’s vanity as art. But next to a true artist like Rohmer, Allen’s small-minded egotism—and laughable lack of craft—are pathetic.
That Allen doesn’t take us to the essence of his characters’ feelings is exposed by Rohmer’s audacious allegory. Rohmer’s 5th-century-set story can be enjoyed for its own sake, but it also means to present basic, universal romantic conflicts—similar to those examined in Allegory of Love, C. S. Lewis’ “study in medieval tradition” that traced the complications humans experience back to their cultural origins. This almost mythological approach gives Astrea and Celadon startling relevance. Although set in the period, Rohmer’s style is not ornamental. After a prologue stating, “We’ve had to shift the location...to retain d’Urfé’s wild poetry and bucolic charm,” Rohmer films his characters blunt-elegantly as in his Moral Tales from the ’70s. We see actors pretending the past, yet their emotions seem modern. As Astrea (Stephanie Crayencour) and Celadon (Andy Gillet) talk out their heartbreak, confusion, humility and ardor, Rohmer transports us visually, sentimentally, intellectually and spiritually.
Conversely, Allen uses a travelogue approach to romance (the Club Med habit once dubbed Club Bed). He shows how the millennial jet set philanders. It’s part of some strange middle-class custom for ethnically reserved (white-centered) movies to employ romance-plus-exoticism. Rebecca Hall plays Vicky, the brunet BFF of Scarlett Johansson’s Cristina (the Iberian spelling goes unexplained). These sisterly American tourists are seduced by a suave Spanish painter, Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem, another Woody draftee cashing in on his recent celebrity). Vicky drops her pants, then her Yankee prudery, unlike thrill-seeker Cristina who insists to Juan Antonio, “You have to seduce me.”
Through this sneaky, sloppy-seconds friendship, Allen pretends complexity but merely confuses basic emotions. Granted, modern amorality allows people to feel they are boldly transgressive in their sexual experimentation, but Allen’s libertinism is superficial next to Rohmer’s concentrated scrutiny of devotion’s difficulties and tensions.
What looks old fashioned in Rohmer’s film is actually daringly exploratory (as morality and aesthetics), while Allen’s modish film is merely prurient. Johanssen, Bardem and Penelope Cruz (as Juan Antonio’s bipolar ex-wife) are undoubtedly three of the sexiest actors in movies today—the temperature of one’s expectations surely rises when they embark upon a ménage a trois. Yet, given Allen’s conceit, their hotness becomes lukewarm.
Fatally, there’s no significant nudity in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which means its sexual frankness is specious. A nude is always immediate; the intimacy of the body and its representation of vulnerability and ardor, seems better handled by certain non-American artists. Rohmer, a French New Wave conservative, works toward a scene of revelatory nudity, making it the film’s erotic pinnacle. This only clarifies Astrea and Celadon’s distinct, profound sexiness. Rohmer’s cast is surreally pretty—a combination of Bresson’s model-actors and Delacroix’s model-subjects. Crayencour’s Astrea has a maidenly delicacy to match the virile purity of Andy Gillet’s Celadon; when their misunderstandings turn farcical, Celadon’s cross-dressing ruse resembles prime Cindy Crawford. These rustics are physically fit, but they also fit both storybook and Racine tradition.
Cinematographer Diane Baratier’s stylized naturalism makes the characters stunning—like museum statues come to life. They enliven Rohmer’s literary conceit and this blood-engorged transfusion is the essence of cinema—nature photographed. (When the nymph Galathee played by Veronique Reymond runs and wind fills her cape, the image becomes instantaneous haute couture). Rohmer recreates the past to idealize the essence of human experience—today as then. (The nymphs study the paintings Saturn, Cupid & Psyche and The Judgement of Paris—a nod to the tapestries hanging in Dreyer’s Gertrud). There’s erotic power in this modesty. When Celadon observes Astrea’s bare leg, the narrator comments, “As he feasted on this sight, he wished like Argus that he had eyes all over his body.”
Apparently, Woody Allen has never seen the body of Rohmer’s work. His bland eye results in flat compositions and unmodulated lighting with no sensuality. Barcelona looks like a brochure. Allen’s talky characters show temerity but no complexity. Anyone who thinks this is a comedy laughs out of irritation. Vicky and Cristina’s friendship is a mere gimmick; one’s prim, the other’s slutty. They lack the depths of dependency and affection that Rohmer outlined in his great 1988 feature, Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle. Instead, Allen’s pretense of Euro-trash sophistication is a cover for smug lust—as fallacious as Ira Sachs’ Married Life and no deeper than Michael Lucas’ porn film, Barcelona Nights.
When Allen plays with a slo-mo kiss, or does an iris out/in transition, the poor technique throws attention to his attitudinizing dialogue: “Come on, let’s not get into one of those turgid categorical imperative conversations” or “She’s a mental adolescent; being romantic she has a death wish.” No longer an honest comic and never a real intellectual, Allen pilfers select artsy prototypes (from Henry James to Henry Miller) faking a high tone. Even Vicky’s pre-assignation dithering steals Bibi Andersson’s memorable dressing-mirror scene in Bergman’s The Touch. Allen’s portrait of Americans abroad is jejune; the personalities are wobbly and the lack of romance makes it all repugnant. But when Rohmer pits a devout lover who confesses, “I cry for only one,” against a randy troubadour who brags, “I don’t cry at all!” he wisely sums up human nature. Rohmer’s contrast is exquisite.
Despite the big budget and name stars, Vicky Cristina Barcelona shows Allen’s 98th film stumbling into mumblecore, fumbling with love and class like a spoiled brat who’s never seen a Rohmer, Malle, Renoir or Ophuls masterpiece. Juan Antonio’s advice to the naive Americans, “The trick is to enjoy life. Accept that it has no meaning whatsoever,” applies foremost to Woody Allen’s movies.
Directed by Eric Rohmer
August 14-20 at Anthology Film Archives
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Directed by Woody Allen
This week we travel from the sublime to the obnoxious through new films by Eric Rohmer and Woody Allen that share the same subject: Love. Rohmer dramatizes philosophy in The Romance of Astrea and Celadon while Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona dabbles in profundity. Rohmer’s love story is a gossamer distillation of a 17th-century novel by Honoré d’Urfé. Its romantic comedy is acted out by pastoral figures: a shepherd and shepherdess interfered with by nymphs and Druids. Allen once again transplants privileged Americans to Europe; two female friends who visit Spain and succumb to Continental sexual license—a Manhattanite’s version of ‘what happens in Europe stays in Europe.’
While Allen’s contemporary characters boast self-consciousness (a throwback to the 1980s vanity of Hannah and Her Sisters), Rohmer’s period film is the one that feels excitingly contemporary. Audaciously—miraculously—The Romance of Astrea and Celadon proposes a more timeless understanding of what it is to love than Allen’s pandering to fashionable cynicism. Peculiarly, depressingly, Vicky Cristina Barcelona’s real subject is the self-deluding subjectivity of bourgeois narcissists who need movies to glamorize their whims and prejudices (thus, receiving an extravagantly laudatory review in The New Yorker). For several decades, the media has praised Woody Allen’s vanity as art. But next to a true artist like Rohmer, Allen’s small-minded egotism—and laughable lack of craft—are pathetic.
That Allen doesn’t take us to the essence of his characters’ feelings is exposed by Rohmer’s audacious allegory. Rohmer’s 5th-century-set story can be enjoyed for its own sake, but it also means to present basic, universal romantic conflicts—similar to those examined in Allegory of Love, C. S. Lewis’ “study in medieval tradition” that traced the complications humans experience back to their cultural origins. This almost mythological approach gives Astrea and Celadon startling relevance. Although set in the period, Rohmer’s style is not ornamental. After a prologue stating, “We’ve had to shift the location...to retain d’Urfé’s wild poetry and bucolic charm,” Rohmer films his characters blunt-elegantly as in his Moral Tales from the ’70s. We see actors pretending the past, yet their emotions seem modern. As Astrea (Stephanie Crayencour) and Celadon (Andy Gillet) talk out their heartbreak, confusion, humility and ardor, Rohmer transports us visually, sentimentally, intellectually and spiritually.
Conversely, Allen uses a travelogue approach to romance (the Club Med habit once dubbed Club Bed). He shows how the millennial jet set philanders. It’s part of some strange middle-class custom for ethnically reserved (white-centered) movies to employ romance-plus-exoticism. Rebecca Hall plays Vicky, the brunet BFF of Scarlett Johansson’s Cristina (the Iberian spelling goes unexplained). These sisterly American tourists are seduced by a suave Spanish painter, Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem, another Woody draftee cashing in on his recent celebrity). Vicky drops her pants, then her Yankee prudery, unlike thrill-seeker Cristina who insists to Juan Antonio, “You have to seduce me.”
Through this sneaky, sloppy-seconds friendship, Allen pretends complexity but merely confuses basic emotions. Granted, modern amorality allows people to feel they are boldly transgressive in their sexual experimentation, but Allen’s libertinism is superficial next to Rohmer’s concentrated scrutiny of devotion’s difficulties and tensions.
What looks old fashioned in Rohmer’s film is actually daringly exploratory (as morality and aesthetics), while Allen’s modish film is merely prurient. Johanssen, Bardem and Penelope Cruz (as Juan Antonio’s bipolar ex-wife) are undoubtedly three of the sexiest actors in movies today—the temperature of one’s expectations surely rises when they embark upon a ménage a trois. Yet, given Allen’s conceit, their hotness becomes lukewarm.
Fatally, there’s no significant nudity in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which means its sexual frankness is specious. A nude is always immediate; the intimacy of the body and its representation of vulnerability and ardor, seems better handled by certain non-American artists. Rohmer, a French New Wave conservative, works toward a scene of revelatory nudity, making it the film’s erotic pinnacle. This only clarifies Astrea and Celadon’s distinct, profound sexiness. Rohmer’s cast is surreally pretty—a combination of Bresson’s model-actors and Delacroix’s model-subjects. Crayencour’s Astrea has a maidenly delicacy to match the virile purity of Andy Gillet’s Celadon; when their misunderstandings turn farcical, Celadon’s cross-dressing ruse resembles prime Cindy Crawford. These rustics are physically fit, but they also fit both storybook and Racine tradition.
Cinematographer Diane Baratier’s stylized naturalism makes the characters stunning—like museum statues come to life. They enliven Rohmer’s literary conceit and this blood-engorged transfusion is the essence of cinema—nature photographed. (When the nymph Galathee played by Veronique Reymond runs and wind fills her cape, the image becomes instantaneous haute couture). Rohmer recreates the past to idealize the essence of human experience—today as then. (The nymphs study the paintings Saturn, Cupid & Psyche and The Judgement of Paris—a nod to the tapestries hanging in Dreyer’s Gertrud). There’s erotic power in this modesty. When Celadon observes Astrea’s bare leg, the narrator comments, “As he feasted on this sight, he wished like Argus that he had eyes all over his body.”
Apparently, Woody Allen has never seen the body of Rohmer’s work. His bland eye results in flat compositions and unmodulated lighting with no sensuality. Barcelona looks like a brochure. Allen’s talky characters show temerity but no complexity. Anyone who thinks this is a comedy laughs out of irritation. Vicky and Cristina’s friendship is a mere gimmick; one’s prim, the other’s slutty. They lack the depths of dependency and affection that Rohmer outlined in his great 1988 feature, Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle. Instead, Allen’s pretense of Euro-trash sophistication is a cover for smug lust—as fallacious as Ira Sachs’ Married Life and no deeper than Michael Lucas’ porn film, Barcelona Nights.
When Allen plays with a slo-mo kiss, or does an iris out/in transition, the poor technique throws attention to his attitudinizing dialogue: “Come on, let’s not get into one of those turgid categorical imperative conversations” or “She’s a mental adolescent; being romantic she has a death wish.” No longer an honest comic and never a real intellectual, Allen pilfers select artsy prototypes (from Henry James to Henry Miller) faking a high tone. Even Vicky’s pre-assignation dithering steals Bibi Andersson’s memorable dressing-mirror scene in Bergman’s The Touch. Allen’s portrait of Americans abroad is jejune; the personalities are wobbly and the lack of romance makes it all repugnant. But when Rohmer pits a devout lover who confesses, “I cry for only one,” against a randy troubadour who brags, “I don’t cry at all!” he wisely sums up human nature. Rohmer’s contrast is exquisite.
Despite the big budget and name stars, Vicky Cristina Barcelona shows Allen’s 98th film stumbling into mumblecore, fumbling with love and class like a spoiled brat who’s never seen a Rohmer, Malle, Renoir or Ophuls masterpiece. Juan Antonio’s advice to the naive Americans, “The trick is to enjoy life. Accept that it has no meaning whatsoever,” applies foremost to Woody Allen’s movies.
