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 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 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 Taylor Williams 9

  There’s a connection to be made between the rules of chivalry piously followed here and the social conventions established in Rohmer’s other films, though in those films the characters meticulously debate all the avenues of interpretation among these conventions, whereas the universal piety here allows the film to critique them from a more removed/objective position.

  The construction here is also really funny, verses where they say “we won’t outline the details of the fight because let’s be real, neither of us have the time for that” in the time it would’ve taken to just outline the details of the fight, or anything else. In addition to the flimsy dioramas, I feel like it’s sort of the 70’s rendition of the…

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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 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 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 Carlos Valladares 9

  Daft! The lead actor called this "a scholarly project, touched by insanity.”

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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 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…