Eric Rohmer: Ancient and Modern
Screening Dates
  • December 11, 2017 8:30
  • December 17, 2017 6:00
  • December 18, 2017 8:25

“Exquisite … Visually innovative and intellectually astute.”

Glenn Kenny, Premiere

Rohmer entered the aughts, as well as his eighties, with this hyper-stylized costume drama, the director’s first literary adaptation since his astonishing, misfit masterpiece Perceval 23 years earlier. Based on the memoirs of Scottish courtesan and spy Grace Elliot, who aided monarchists in France during the Reign of Terror, it casts Lucy Russell (Toni Erdmann) opposite Jean-Claude Dreyfus (Delicatessen) as the titular aristocrats and former lovers—she a royalist sympathizer, he a throne-renouncing revolutionary. Rohmer, ahead of the curve, shot the film on burgeoning digital video and used blue-screen exteriors to superimpose his costumed players onto an uncanny, 18th-century Paris fabricated through CGI and matte painting. The result, elegant and unusual, adds a ravishing visual palette to this talkative tale of political intrigue and right-leaning historical revisionism.