Sunday night double feature

I watched an odd pairing of romantic movies last night. The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Les amours d'Astrée et de Céladon, 2007) is based on the 17th century pastoral romance, L'Astrée, by Honoré d'Urfé. It's the story of the loves and misunderstandings amongst rustic shepherds, nymphs, and druids in 5th Century Gaul. It's also quite possibly the last film directed by Eric Rohmer, who was in his mid-'80s when he made this. There isn't really much of an attempt at a realistic depiction of 5th century life. This is a romance, a kind of fantasy, and it has a very playful attitude toward representation -- a 21st century take on a 17th century take on 5th century characters. The story is very simple, yet full of precise details. Astrea comes to believe that Celadon has been unfaithful to her, and he throws himself into a river in despair at her scorn. He is rescued by nymphs and directed by a druid in the task of winning Astrea back. Astrea meanwhile is distraught that her suspicion caused her lover to commit suicide (so she thinks). While these plots are woven together, we are given several philosophical disquisitions on love, including a neoplatonic argument that lovers become one, with the soul of each lover turning into the soul of the beloved. One of the odd aspects of the film, perhaps taken from the book, is that the druids seem to be crypto-Christians, presented as such visually and given a discourse on Celtic gods that sounds a lot like the Christian Trinity.

This is a very strange little movie, but I was into it throughout. It has a limpid quality that a lot of late-career films seem to have. It is gentle and sweet and full of simple wisdom. This is enough to overcome a couple of off-key songs and languid pacing. I've now ordered Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois (1978), which is his adaptation of the unfinished Parsifal story by Chrétien de Troyes.

Then I had to go back to Michael Curtiz's My Dream Is Yours, which is the 1949 Doris Day musical I mentioned in passing a while back. Martin Scorsese described it as a musical noir, and although that description didn't resonate with me when I watched it the first time, the movie kept nagging at me in memory. I'm not sure what it is exactly, but I think it has to do with a couple of unusual story elements. This is a pretty cliche story of a talent agent looking for a hot new star when his previous client dumps him. Doris Day is the young thing he discovers. One of the unusual story elements is that she's a single mother. Her husband died in the war. Early on she is forced to leave her son behind the first time she goes to Hollywood, and the scene is absolutely devastating. (The kid is a great actor.) Then we get a long sequence in which the agent tries to get her a job, which is one long string of downbeat defeats ending with her taking a job in what is depicted as one step up from a strip joint. This is probably the most noirish aspect of the film, although it's mostly played for humor. More conventionally, perhaps, the Day character falls for the caddish previous client of our agent protagonist. We know she's in love with the wrong man, and we know she's going to end up with the agent. What's perhaps less conventional (I'm not really sure about this) is that part of the way we know this is that the agent is portrayed as a good father figure, to the extent of a scene in which he's cooking dinner wearing an apron. It must be said that one of the great pleasures of the film is Eve Arden as the agent's best pal and long-suffering business partner, who mocks him in this scene for wearing drag. He takes it good-naturedly. He's a good guy.

Another attraction of the film is seeing this era in Technicolor, which was still relatively rare in the '40s, although musicals were one of the main genres where it was used. The film has a really great look. There's also a somewhat under-imagined sequence where Bugs Bunny shows up in the little boy's dream. Apparently Warner Bros was trying to keep up with MGM, which had recently shown Gene Kelly dancing with Tom and Jerry.

So a strange little movie in its own right, although far different from the first half of the double feature.