Popular reviews

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 32

  Éric Rohmer goes in search of directing’s Holy Grail in “Perceval le Gallois:” The film is a quest to find success out of time, out of place, and out of almost every stylization that defines him as an auteur. 

  “Perceval” is the second of two entries in a brief era during which Rohmer dabbled in the period drama. “Marquise of O,” its predecessor, more directly aligned with Rohmer’s modern milieu of parlors and upper middle class exchange of intellect. “Perceval,” has neither. 

  And yet, Rohmer embarks on his quest nonetheless.

  What the film does carry with it into battle is an ethos that is the standard bearer for scant few other historical epics. Rohmer sets the entirety of the work…

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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 comrade_yui ★★★★★

  an anti-naturalist film made by one of cinema's premier naturalist storytellers; so many other directors choose to re-imagine the reality of the past as an organic world, but rohmer instead re-creates how the medievalists conceived of their own world as an episodic musical farce. this is the least 'epic' rendition of the arthurian mythos that i've seen, yet also the most epic, because it doesn't boil down the story into a three-act structure with big bloody battles -- perceval repeats its own choral refrains, shreds chivalry into ridiculous puns and jokes, and reignites the tradition of figures like perceval and christ and don quixote as holy fools who venture across the land, their innate folly revealing the beauty and insanity…

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  Review by Noah DiVincenzo ★★★★ 2

  Haven’t seen much of Rohmer just due to  a lack of resources over the years and waiting for the time where I’d most likely enjoy his films more. I think French cinema has to be watched with some patience and wisdom, and I think now is the time I start to watch some more. But  I’ve read much about him over the years and have heard a lot about his films through distant French family members who pointed me in the direction towards his work , some years ago. But finally having Letterboxd and even a criterion subscription makes things much easier. And interesting enough , this one’s on Tubi right now. 

  Perceval is a very unique film, and for…

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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 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 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 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 Mathias Larsen ★★★½

  Very enjoyable! 

  I don’t really like Fabrice Luchini tbh.. still this was pretty good! Éric Rohmer’s vision is maybe a bit stranger than usual and it kinda felt like I was watching some surreal side quest of sorts. 

  Almost childlike feel and with playful filmmaking that feels like a break from his more naturalistic direction, still not breaking the mold and you can clearly feel this is a Rohmer. The storytelling is great! 

  My issue mostly lies with the plastic set designs, especially when you think that Rohmer made this movie, a director known for his realistic and argumentative touch. I’m not a fan of the actors in this either especially Fabrice Luchini which always felt out of place in the Rohmerverse.

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  Review by Jaime Rebanal ★★★★½

  Another period piece by way of Éric Rohmer, but I've always found that if anything made his films so special it's the way in which these films are told. Rohmer isn't someone who allows these films to feel like they're so ordinary, but the case with Perceval is quite clear; its structuring is one that can only be properly attributed to the films of Rohmer. It's one that adapts the text at face value, but whether or not that's something that'll be easy enough for you to enjoy is completely up to you.

  If you're watching a movie like this next to Lancelot du Lac that'd be an interesting experience in itself because these two films feel like polar opposites.…

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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…