Eric Rohmer, practically the poster boy for Verbal Cinema, tries his hand at a special-effects movie. That's not to say that it's any less talky, stilted, static, and stagy than Rohmer's norm: a fact-based tale of the French Revolution, taken from the memoirs of one Grace Elliott, an English aristocrat transplanted in Paris near her former lover, the Duc d'Orléans. Rather than try to find unaltered locations in which to re-create the 18th Century (unaltered, that is, apart from an additional two centuries of age), Rohmer has opted to position his people in computer-generated cityscapes and landscapes similar in principle to Hollywood standard practice. Similar, but also dissimilar. The concept is the same -- real people inserted into illusory settings -- but the intention to deceive is very different. Rohmer makes no pretense of passing off his fakes as real. They are plainly paintings, a long way short of photorealism in detail, and increasingly sketchy as the perspective recedes. The "reality" they evoke is that of the visual documents of the period: paintings come to life. Or more precisely, paintings populated and animated. The effect, always a little strange, at times a little silly, is something like the sight of Bob Hoskins in Toontown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or Jeff Bridges inside the computer in Tron: the French Revolution by Game Boy. All this goes down easier, though, than the digital-video image in the non-CG interior scenes: the anemic color, the flattened forms and perspectives, the literally chintzy surface of the image. The rough equivalent, in short, of the grainy blown-up 16mm with which Rohmer has sometimes chosen to work, and which helps the viewer (not with total infallibility) to divide Rohmer's seemingly homogeneous oeuvre into his better efforts and his lesser. Lucy Russell, Jean-Claude Dreyfus. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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