by ·Comments Off on Lancelot of the Lake (1974, Robert Bresson)

So many funny things about the opening violence montage, from the extremely Monty Python-reminiscent beheadings to how Bresson, who cares so very much about performance style, cares less about blood-spurt mechanics. Text crawl says the rest of the action takes place after fruitless years of searching for the holy grail. The king misses all his dead knights… his nephew Gawain is restless… everyone hates Mordred… and Lancelot is busy having an affair with the queen. At a jousting tournament L fights his own guys and everyone gets hurt – Bresson ignores the knights and films their horses. Lancelot is missing presumed dead after the tournament until he returns and kills Gawain and steals the queen (then returns her). Mordred has had enough and takes the castle, King and L fight together, everyone dies.

Short and swift with excellent color (on my copy, at least). I can’t find who was just saying it’s one of the all-time most annoying movies to overhear from another room (clank, clank). The only actor who’s been in other films is Lionel: Humbert Balsan, who got picked up by Rivette, Brisseau, Pialat, and Sam Fuller.

Jonathan Rosenbaum:

According to Michel Estève, neither the tents nor the Round Table nor the chess game nor the wooden tub in which Guenièvre bathes belongs to the period, all of them constituting conscious anachronisms on Bresson’s part. This is a distinctly modern Lancelot, in striking contrast to the relatively “medieval” atmosphere of Bresson’s last two films, both set in contemporary Paris, where the gentle creature in Une Femme Douce often suggested a lonely maiden in a tower waiting to be rescued, and the dreamer in Four Nights of a Dreamer resembled a wandering knight in search of a pure love that was equally hopeless. The sense of elongated durations and passing seasons that we associate with the romances of Chrétien de Troyes is more evident in Balthazar, or even in John Ford’s The Searchers, than in the tightly compressed episodes of Lancelot, where action and event is all.

by ·Comments Off on The Green Knight (2021, David Lowery)

Dev Patel’s finest role, in a pleasingly confounding movie. Mostly grey-brown tale of a knight trying to prove himself by journeying to fulfill a bargain with an immortal. I didn’t realize how much of the movie would be the journey, since you only hear about the bookending scenes.

Dev P.

There’s silver plate photography, giants, a digital-ass fox. The king and queen are played by Prometheus costars Sean Harris and Kate Dickle, and his witchy mum is Mississippi Masala star Sarita Choudhury. Barry Keoghan ambushes him and steals his horse. There’s a whole ending where Dev becomes king, but he also died earlier, so I lost track of what’s real.

Barry K.

Adam Nayman in The Ringer calls out “its self-aggrandizing style and prepackaged gravitas.”

Lowery’s fable about a half-human, half-arboreal creature patiently cultivating a lethal debt against a crumbling civilization vibrates with a certain apocalyptic anxiety, one that’s been color-coded for maximum effect. Stoic, implacable, and only resigned to defeat in Round 1 because he knows his revenge is impending, the Green Knight … terrifies as a figure out of a woodcut … but he’s also an avatar of climate change.

by ·Comments Off on Perceval Le Gallois (1979, Eric Rohmer)

I didn’t expect this from the most naturalistic of the French new wavers. It’s a period musical adaptation of an epic poem – that part seems up Rohmer’s alley – but he uses spare, symbolic sets (anticipating the digital backdrops of The Lady and the Duke) and has the actors read their character’s dialogue and accompanying narration, speaking along with their actions so as not to break up the verses. The source poem is incomplete, so the story trails off at the end, but not before a momentum-killing passion play with our lead character as Jesus on the cross. It’s quirky and unique, and I liked the story somewhat, but didn’t warm up to the simple lead character or the renaissance music. As far as French movies set in weirdly artificial castles starring Andre Dussolier go, I prefer La Vie est un roman.

Young Andre Dussolier with Perceval:

Perceval (Fabrice Luchini, who’d recently starred in Immoral Tales) takes advice given him VERY seriously, listening first to his mother, then a “worthy man” he meets on his travels. But he is dumb as hell, and sometimes misinterprets the intent of the advice, firstly when he barges into a knight’s tent, steals some food and molests the woman inside. I’m not sure what advice led to that. Later he’s told that it’s better to stay silent than say stupid stuff, so in the enchanted castle of the Fisher King, he doesn’t ask about the miraculous bleeding spear and glowing bowl he sees, and so is cursed for his lack of humility, and spends five years wandering godlessly through the wilderness while his mother dies alone back home. As with many ancient texts, the story takes logical leaps that I don’t follow.

Magic woman with awesome hair who delivers the Fisher King curse:

Perceval Christ:

Elsewhere, Perceval falls for a woman named Blanchefleur (Arielle Dombasle, who made an impression as the goofy wheelchair woman in La Belle Captive), defends her castle and promises to marry her. He gets respect from King Arthur and starts sending his defeated enemies to the King for punishment instead of finishing them off. Then the movie leaves Perceval for a long while, following Arthurian knight Gawain (Dussolier) on a quest to clear his name from some murderous accusation, with a stop on the way to win a jousting contest on behalf of a rich girl. I love that the same choir of musical servants (including Pascale Ogier of Le Pont du Nord, in her first role) appears in every location. I also love the look of the film, and a weird scene involving cartoon geese.

There’s Pascale on the right:

Perceval with Blanchefleur:

Rosenbaum:

a medieval musical that feels a bit like a western … The merit of Rohmer’s realism in Perceval is that it brings something otherwise dead and forgotten to life – not because Rohmer’s imagination is especially rich but because he sees no alternative to his literalism, even if it makes some audiences laugh in disbelief.