Critics reviews

The movie is a daringly straightforward translation of an archaic work, complete with lengthy metaphysical debates about the nature of love and the essential monotheism of Druidic religion.

With his last film, Eric Rohmer left the stage with an audacious flourish, infusing a fifth-century pastoral fantasy with a lifetime of stories, passions, and big ideas... The crucial moments are dialectical—a disputation between a faithful lover and a capering libertine, a druid's pagan proof of monotheism and the Trinity. As a result, it takes Rohmer a long time to reunite the original pair, but from love delayed, he asserts, music, painting, poetry, architecture, and religion are born.

Éric Rohmer's last film is a rare thing: an enthusiastic engagement with literary pastoral at its most mannered... In the main, and especially in the film's many nature scenes, Rohmer eschews high style in favour of a naturalistic kind of filmmaking that is less reminiscent of seventeenth-century Baroque than of the Romantic and nineteenth-century landscape traditions.

Love and fidelity again come into alignment, and [Astrea and Celadon] embrace in a new, tear-stained awareness of the other's truth. It is an ending of ecstatic revelation, one only rivaled by The Green Ray in Rohmer's work. And in a career forever concerned with exposing the feminine in his personality, to end with a scene of cross-dressing, of entering into the female domain and learning its secrets, is a lovely wish-fulfillment fantasy for one of cinema's great directors of women.