One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie.
Flanked by theatrical bed-curtains, two women exchange sidelong glances as they untie each other’s hair and plant kisses on each other’s fingers. All the world’s a stage, Éric Rohmer seems to say in his final film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007), but never more so than in the bedroom. Set in a candle-lit chateau interior, the encounter is simultaneously a coy sapphic experiment and a monogamous heterosexual reunion: with the aid of make-up and a “druid’s potion” to halt the growth of his facial hair, the spurned Celadon (Andy Gillet) has begun to redeem himself, in the eyes of his lover Astrea (Stéphanie Crayencour), by becoming a woman.
Captured in an unflinching long take, there is a refreshing directness to this moment, one of the rare instances of on-screen physical contact between two lovers in Rohmer’s filmography. In the Moral Tales, he portrayed relations between men and women as a frustrated asymptote, while in the Comedies and Proverbs, he seized on the trope of lovers glimpsed and misrecognized through windows and doorways. Heterosexual desire, as an attempt to know and master the other’s foreignness, fails. Platonic relationships between women hinted at a way out of this deadlock, with one of the first glimmers of reciprocated love, in Rohmer, arriving via a sensual moment in Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987): two female friends enraptured by the early-morning “blue hour.” The women approach one another through a dawning vision hovering between illumination and shadow, making contact through their obscurity.
Rohmer is a filmmaker who is faithful to appearances and their unnatural effervescence: his images both conform to and perform reality. In other words, they are animated, in the etymological sense of giving a soul, “anima,” to something. He once went so far as to plant a rose in time for it to be in full bloom, a year later, for the filming of Claire’s Knee (1970). This tiny displacement of natural appearance has cosmic reverberations: in Rohmer’s animated universe, all of nature is unnatural, performing. His camera conforms to a world in process, a past that is still unfolding in the present. In Astrea and Celadon, the deliberately artificial costumes and make-up reveal that the past is not finished, not something that can be definitively known, only continually reanimated and performed. The two lovers also give each other the freedom to reappear in their unfinished indeterminacy, re-potentializing relations between the sexes. Astrea’s misrecognition of her lover, unbelievable in realistic terms, is simultaneously a recognition of his unpredictable internal élan. Like the rose planted by Rohmer, his nature is animated.