Popular reviews

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★

  Rohmer sets an unfinished epic in an unfinished world: all flat backgrounds, black-box costumes and signifier props. Yet this closed set and all its circular wandering produce a funny, bittersweet, analytical critique of its source literature and the mythic history embedded in it. His characters clearly walk in circles in the small set, but his interacting choruses routinely refuse to sing about what has already happened, asking in meter what would be the point, while actions are amusingly posed for an eventual tapestry than actually performed. Rohmer pokes fun at the chivalric purity that drives Perceval, portraying his unthinking obedience to what he is taught as vaguely sheeplike, the stubborn single-mindedness of a fool.

  Rohmer's characters often destroy their desires…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black

  A stylized, colorful rendition of Arthurian legends regarding Perceval, based on the incomplete works from the 12th century, this film is well adapted from its source material, or the small fraction of it I am familiar with. It is stilted, removed, and poetic, lyrical and pious. It captures the outsized quality of the tales, which have no room for realism or nuanced characterization. What you find instead is a mythic narrative, a metaphorical representation of ideals and long forgotten social rules.

  In order to achieve some sense of 900 year old style, Rohmer uses lines from the actual works not quite as dialogue, but as narration from the lips of the characters, who are often telling you what they are…

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★½

  As with The Marquise of O, this radical departure offers a chance to get a clearer view of the quiet genius of Rohmer's usual work. Like his adaptation of Kleist's novella, his approach to de Troyes is so faithful that it renders the ostensibly stultifying and anti-cinematic act of dutiful literary transposition as something avant-garde, here crafting a living tapestry of circular motion and declamatory dialogue with sets that achieve a kind of minimal-maximalism, as opulently conceived and lit as they are transparently flimsy and two-dimensional.

  One can also see how Rohmer's conservative political and religious ideals did not preclude him from having a sense of humor about them. You could argue this is as much an adaptation of the…

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  Review by jrhovind ★★★★

  Rohmer confronts the fact that we’re just ultimately never really going to know what life was like in the early Middle Ages by dazzlingly imagining it as a space of complete artificiality; miniature castles as if made of papier-mâché, flatly drawn backdrops and cartoonish flowers planted on the floor, ornately stylized pewter trees sprouting up as signifiers of vast forests, fake birdsong performed by court musicians. DP Almendros even shoots the stage-set world free of shadow, as if we’re watching some impossible film from before the Renaissance discovery of perspective. If the art of Arthurian romance is devoted to fallible humans’ search for the ideal, or at least some version of the ideal that can actually be put to use…

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  Review by Evan “Kaizō Haya-shill” Pincus ★★★½

  Torn between saying “this is incoherently structured and essentially lacks an ending” as a critique and saying “this is incoherently structured and essentially lacks an ending” as an expression of admiration for committing to the bit when adapting an unfinished work. Either way, this is incoherently structured and essentially lacks an ending, and is also altogether too long. It’s never not striking, though, and offers plenty of dry snark-adjacent humor and strange beauty. Rohmer doesn’t strike me as the sort of director who one would expect to deal in this sort of creative and compelling formal filmmaking (which is not a dig, no matter how much it may sound like one, but I will admit that most of his movies…

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  Review by Luke McCarthy

  Rohmer's Perceval remains a singular vision, a film which doesn't ask to be liked or enjoyed, simply to be experienced. By adapting ancient text in the most literal way imaginable, Rohmer seeks to demonstrate how utterly abstract storytelling used to be. Characters narrate their own actions, the structure is both perplexing and enigmatic and the performances emphasise exaggerated, poetic movements. The film feels like a celebration of medieval melodrama, one which subtly satirises it's subjects whilst treating them with the utmost sense of dignity.
  The mise-en-scene is starkly theatrical, Rohmer making no attempt to hide the fact that his characters are roaming around bare, expressionistic sets (the gorgeous use of colour here makes these elements seem even more surreal). All…

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  Review by Lencho of the Apes ★★★ 5

  Epic adventure deconstructed; Rohmer dramatizes a 13th century Arthurian-cycle narrative poem while abandoning all the conventions that have been used since the Renaissance to create verisimilitude. Locations are patently stylized and artifice-ial, narrative voice changes without warning from first-person to third-person; nothing is done in a way that looks remotely 'realistic' in any sense.

  It all points *toward* a Medieval sensibility, in a way that highlights how very foreign that is to us today; a really intriguing experiment... but I'm not sure it's something I would have chosen to spend time watching. Loved the trees, though.

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  Review by freelunch ★★★½ 4

  Genuinely perplexed as to what made Éric Rohmer want to make something like this. Was he hanging around Fellini a lot in the 70s... and experienced a little bit of LSD? Or did his BFF Jacques Rivette convince him to embrace his “weird” side? Who cares, because this shit was awesome and it was cool to see him pull something like this off.

  Like João César Monteiro‘s Silvestre this is a fable like story shot like a play, complete with paper sets and all. The aesthetics, however, are a lot more fantastical. The colors in Rohmer’s films have always been perfect, and this film is eye candy. I’ve said before that his use of green is unmatched, and this here…

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  Review by rickmasters ★★★★½ 1

  As far as I know, this is one of the only major Arthurian legend adaptations to really convey the fragmented story-telling aspect of wandering knights having disparate adventures as opposed to one linear streamlined epic. It's more faithful of the source material in that manner. I've never been one to fully care about adaptational faithfulness, especially for a set of stories that's been so archetypal, but there's something very appealing with the "light" touch Rohmer brings to subject material that's very often treated with such momentous heft. Given the comparatively limited capacity of cinematic material to written material, most directors choose to focus exclusively on the larger stories and omit smaller details that don't have direct impact on those stories.…

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  Review by Maxime_Gerin ★★★★

  Sire Rohmer
  De chaudes larmes m'ont fait couler et mon lit mouiller
  Des remords terribles de n'avoir point le pouvoir de vous faire chevalier
  D'entre tous vos portraits si justes et détaillés de notre modernité
  Vous avez osé faire naître cet objet sans frère ni soeur
  Une chose si étrange que son existence aux miracles donne foi
  S'il vous venait l'envie de redescendre des cieux
  Vos pieds je baiserais mille fois et d'or je vous couvrirais tout entier
  Moult mercis cher ami

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  Review by Rick Burin ½ 2

  Art is subjective, isn’t it. For example, I have no idea how anyone could enjoy this.

  Rohmer’s seventh feature is a purposefully artificial adaptation of a 12th century Arthurian legend, and feels like a school play.

  A gormless, allegedly Welsh youth wanders around a small stage-set, banging on about his mum and meeting various worthy men, bearded adversaries and women he can sexually assault, as characters po-facedly narrate their own behaviour, regularly interrupted by a gaggle of medieval minstrels who sing everything to the same annoying melody.

  The Brechtian devices prevent any emotional engagement with the material, but there’s no other level on which to engage with it. And the film is incredibly literal but somehow not literal enough, as…

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  Review by 𝐅𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐨 ½ 6

  👍🏽