Yes, there’s a new Eric Rohmer movie, and yes, it’s premiering in New York tonight. How come you didn’t know about it? I don’t know, but I barely knew about it (or at least, about its scheduled premiere), so don’t feel too bad. The Romance of Astree and Celadon screened last year at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals, and then sat on the shelf for awhile until Koch Lorber picked it up; its one-week run at Anthology Film Archives is probably a run up to an impending release on DVD. But as all signs point to this being the 88 year-old French master’s final film, you’ll probably want to take your final chance to see a new Rohmer film on a big screen.

Céladon won quite a few hearts in Toronto, but it didn’t seem to go over so well when it screened at NYFF. 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 in line for the ladies room. I’ll admit that it may not be Rohmer’s finest hour in terms of filmmaking craft; comparisons to a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream may not be entirely off the mark. 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 plot is typical fable stuff: Astree and Celadon are young lovers planning to marry when a misunderstanding leads Astree to doubt Celadon’s infidelity. Sure that things are totally mucked up and that his beloved will never forgive him, Celadon tries to kill himself. Astree thinks Celadon is dead and cannot be consoled, but she doesn’t know that he was actually saved by the 5th century version of a femme fatale. Various philosophical meditations on love and commitment ensue, until Celadon finally figures out the appropriate guise for sneaking back into Astree’s life.

The central hour of the film is a little silly and sloggy. It fairly oozes that certain trademark Rohmer essence that Pauline Kael (pejoratively) termed “seriocomic triviality.” But 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.