Day 3 of NYFF 2007 brought surprisingly strong late-career efforts from two esteemed filmmakers previously thought to be several decades past their prime. To my mind, Eric Rohmer’s Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon is a greater creative success than Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, although I suppose there’s no doubt as to which film will manage the greater commercial success (it’s not even a contest, really–the Rohmer has no U.S. distributor). Lumet’s film is a proper comeback, the work of a filmmaker returning to familiar themes and, if not exactly reinventing them, then certainly doing his most solid and engaging work in some time. But the Rohmer picture feels like a true farewell, and as final films go, I can’t imagine a more poignant send off.

Céladon won quite a few hearts in Toronto, but it didn’t seem to go over so well here in New York. I know more than a few members of the press corps didn’t make it to the final frame, and after the screening, I heard a lot of “awful”s and “interminable”s. I’ll admit that it may not be Rohmer’s finest hour in terms of filmmaking craft; when Alison Willmore compares the film to a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she’s not entirely wrong. But I would argue that the plotting needs to be as deliberate as it is, and the overall technique as rudimentary, in order for the film to work as a romantic fable.

The central hour of the film can feel like a silly slog, as it oozes that certain trademark Rohmer essence that Pauline Kael (pejoratively) termed “seriocomic triviality.” In the final thirty minutes Céladon develops into a beautifully bizarre, softcore fairy tale of sorts, and amazingly, it’s at the film’s absurdist peak that Rohmer’s deeper themes become clear. For a film in which a hot-to-trot nymph princess imprisons a cross-dressing himbo, it offers a surprisingly touching celebration of the spiritual over the physical, and as a tale of a crisis of romantic faith, it could play comfortably alongside any of the 1930s marriage comedies. As a probable capper to Rohmer’s career, Céladon’s underlying sentiment may be more moving than what’s actually on screen, but that’s enough for me.

Lumet’s film has quite a bit more casual nudity than Rohmer’s (which is no small feat), but it’s considerably less erotic. It’s the story of two brothers, Hank and Andy (Ethan Hawke and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, both throwing fantastic tantrums), who plot to rob their mom and dad’s strip-mall jewelry store. Both men are deep in debt and battling various demons; both are separately and unwittingly plotting to run away with Andy’s wife (an oft-topless Marisa Tomei). The plan goes horribly awry, and as consequences mount and each brother loses his tenuous grip on reality, Lumet shuttles back and forth in time, juggling narrative blocks in order to examine and re-examine each situation from various points of view.

The gimmick becomes somewhat tiresome as the film wears on. Paradoxically, though the repetition does offer Lumet and his actors the opportunity to really take each character apart, the chronological shuttling works as a distancing device, forever preventing any real audience engagement with the people on screen. Hoffman’s performance could best be described as bloated (and not in a totally negative way), but Hawke, Tomei and Albert Finney are doing some really fascinating, nuanced work, and it’s all just slightly diluted by Lumet’s formal agitations. It’s a solid crime thriller (the violence had me gasping in shock more than once) and a well-crafted family melodrama, but it’s the performances that make it really watchable. Post-Capote, Hoffman doesn’t have to break a sweat to act the crap out of this kind of material, but Hawke does, and watching him do so is great fun.

There have been grumblings that ThinkFilm, a distributor best known documentaries and midnight-ish movies like The Ten, may not be able to successfully package a “prestige” picture of this magnitude. But Devil strikes me as a well-done but not intimidatingly unusual hybrid of blood and brains, and I think they’d have to be really incompetent to not be able to sell this film to the same commercical audiences that went to The Departed. When it comes to awards, they certainly have a great, built-in hook with Lumet, who was awarded an Honorary Oscar two years ago but has never won a Best Director statue, but depending on how the season unfolds, he may need one hell of a campaign to win.

That campaign would probably revolve around age hysteria––”He’s 83! This could be his last film!!!”––but Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead doesn’t feel like a last film at all. If anything, it seems to embody the youthful recklessness and willingness to experiment that Francis Ford Coppola has said he’s tried to achieve with Youth Without Youth. If Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon plays like a sweet farewell to former glories, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead looks like a clear attempt to reclaim them.

For more on Sidney Lumet, check out our previous coverage of his NYFF press conference here.