Having finished his acclaimed cinematic quartet "Contes des quatre saisons," legendary filmmaker Eric Rohmer takes DV camera in hand to recreate this idiosyncratic period piece adapted from the Grace Elliot memoirs. Concerned with faithfully evoking 18th century France, Rohmer uses two strategies -- using only eyewitness accounts of the times and avoiding all external settings, arguing that Paris now is a completely different city than it was during revolutionary times. The story revolves around
Grace Elliot (Lucy Russell), a Scottish aristocrat stranded in Paris during the French Revolution. She is once again thrown together with Philippe Egalite, the cousin to the king, the Duke of Orleans, and Grace's former lover. Their friendship remains complicated and uncertain, and is made all the more complex by the rush of events around them. This film was screened at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi
Leave it to Rohmer, now 82, to find a way to bend current technique to the service of a vision of the past that is faithful to both architectural glories and commanding open spaces of the city as it was more than two centuries ago.
Whenever the subtleties of political morality get a bit overbearing, there's a respite in the painterly streets of Paris, where, we are reminded, the past was another city, strange and resistant to present-day adornments.
Though not one of Rohmer best films, it's worth seeing for the acting and the dialogue which magnify the glory of the French language. Amazingly, at 81, Rohmer continues to be productive; rejection of film by Cannes Festival stirred controversy in 2001
Who would have thought that in the year of Spider-Man and Attack of the Clones, the year's most innovative use of special effects would come in a film about the French Revolution?
Rohmer's novel, exhilarating and elegant work with painted scenery and digital equipment is a revelation. But this work is stuck in a film in which the foreground action is sleep-inducing by comparison.
Rohmer makes a gracious, if occasionally tedious, effort to dress the French Revolution in digitally rendered scenes that bespeak the period perfectly.
Seldom has the elegant past of 18th century royal life married modern filmmaking with the grace and sophistication of Eric Rohmer's L'anglaise et le duc.
After having exclusively viewed contemporary cinema over the past 3 weeks and all the inherently "unsure" cinema that such an exercise involves, watching the total and complete confidence of old man Rohmer was like mana from heaven. Rohmer finally lends his conservatism to didactic political prominence with this
vicious attack on the horrors of the French Revolution. It owes everything to Rossellini's historical films, and, sadly, Rohmer is probably the only director today still looking directly to Rossellini's historical films for inspiration.
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