Futures and Pasts: Perceval le Gallois

The adjective “Rohmeresque,” if it doesn’t have quite the same cachet as “Lynchian” or “Felliniesque,” continues to offer a convenient shorthand for describing a particular kind of cinema: one still sees it trotted out occasionally for the latest by Hong Sangsoo, and it got a good workout with each entry of Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy. Referring to the adoptive surname of the filmmaker born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer, what it suggests, broadly, is a certain naturalism of style (plein-air real-world locations, little in the way of showy cinematographic razzle-dazzle), a proclivity for quotidian subject matter (no shoot-outs, car chases, or any of the other staples of the genre film absent from most of our workaday lives), and a focus on relationships between characters largely understood through their dialogue: what they say, what they neglect to mention, and our observation of how their actions belie their words. As with most generalities, this description is accurate enough, though it runs into difficulties when confronted with 1978’s Perceval le Gallois.

The film is an adaptation of the unfinished 12th-century verse romance Perceval, the Story of the Grail by Chrétien de Troyes, a French author of whose life little is known today, but whose writings would be the taproot from which sprang the many and varied works making up the literature of Arthurian romance. Shot entirely in the sunless confines of the Epinay Studios outside Paris, this Perceval le Gallois abounds in miraculous visions and feats of arms, boasts scenery that makes no effort to imitate the natural or man-made world, retains the distinctive octosyllabic meter of its source material—in a new, original translation of de Troyes’s Old French by its director—in dialogue that is variously spoken and sung, and all things considered cannot claim to be possessed of a single one of the Rohmeresque qualities listed above, even though it happens to have been directed by Éric Rohmer.

Fabrice Luchini, who as a teenager had played a small part in Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee (1970), is his Perceval, introduced as a callow, wide-eyed, headstrong, slightly cloddish and insensitive stripling who, upon witnessing the exotic sight of a detachment of King Arthur’s men passing through the remote “woods” owned by his widowed mother, sets out from his family “castle” to join their number. (Production designer Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko’s trees are sculptural objects, closer to avant-garde coat racks than anything found in a forest; his citadel walls, cardboard and plywood under a veneer of gold paint; a lake, kernels of fiberglass.) In this opening, as in the relaying of Perceval’s attainment of knighthood, his encounter with the Fisher King, and his many other adventures, Rohmer is doggedly loyal to de Troyes’s text, even following when, about halfway through it, the author proves disloyal to his protagonist, putting Perceval aside to turn his attention to the peregrinations of Arthur’s nephew, Sir Gawain—André Dussollier in Rohmer’s film.

Rohmer makes no attempt to straighten out the thread of de Troyes’s tale, rather a frayed, knotty affair to a viewer accustomed to the linear, streamlined dramaturgy of the “well-made” 19th-century novel that continues to dominate screenwriting seminars to this day. His Perceval also blithely violates a holy writ of the gurus who teach said seminars—“Show, don’t tell”—by retaining many of de Troyes’s descriptive passages. Some by a chorus of varying sizes and compositions who appear both in cutaways and in the same frame as the dramatis personae, oft accompanied by instruments of the period: the lute, the rebec, the jaw harp, the shawm, the citole, the chalumeau, the transverse flute… (These melodies were the work of the musicologist Guy Robert, drawing upon various period musical manuscripts and the lone surviving composition by de Troyes; for some years after the release of Rohmer’s film Robert and his players would tour and record as the “Ensemble Perceval.”) The characters actually participant in the drama, are employed as narrators too, their dialogue often preceded by third person preambles (“The youth said:”; “Aghast, he shouted:”) or longer descriptions of actions depicted (“The young maid took him in gently by the hand…”) This sui generis approach to literary adaptation, and the frequent comic effects that Rohmer renders of it—Perceval more than once comments aloud on the subject of his own silence; a female soloist sings, “I could describe each blow, but is it worth your time or mine?” over a battle raging on-screen—drew little praise and much befuddlement upon Perceval’s release.

Perceval le Gallois (1978)

This most anomalous, confounding film would appear in an interlude between the two film series for which Rohmer is best known, his Six Moral Tales (1963-1972) and Comedies and Proverbs (1981-1987). The conclusion of the former represented the end of a long march begun as far back as 1949 when Rohmer—still then Schérer, an aspiring author of literary fiction living austerely in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, keeping odd company with a hell-raising skirt-chaser by the name of Paul Gégauff, and thinking not at all of a life in cinema—finished a suite of short stories, Contes moreaux, in which appeared tales describing the same ethical dilemmas and in some cases featuring the very same storylines he would begin to film in the 1960s.

It was after his first feature, The Sign of Leo (completed 1959, released 1962), had disappeared without a trace that Rohmer, undaunted, launched into his ambitious Moral Tales project, an undertaking that would decide the course of conduct for the next 10 years and provide him with a sense of mission—a Grail to pursue, if you like. Testament to Rohmer’s obduracy, his quest was not only completed, but by the time it was, it had found the author a quite sizable public. The cycle concluded with Love in the Afternoon (1972), a critical and commercial success at home as well as in several overseas markets, as had been My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Claire’s Knee. Rohmer, a decade or more the elder of his erstwhile colleagues at Cahiers du Cinéma who had gone on to Nouvelle vague celebrity as filmmakers while he remained lingering in their shadows, was now arguably the best-known of them all—certainly almost no one was making claims that Dr. Popaul (1972), the latest Claude Chabrol picture from a screenplay by Rohmer’s old confrere Gégauff, was any kind of masterpiece. And it was at this zenith that Rohmer, just on the far side of 50, recused himself entirely from making the sort of movies that had won him his newfound popularity, sublimating his distinctive authorial personality in adapting the works of others.

His Perceval was preceded by Rohmer’s first period film, 1976’s The Marquise of O, a scrupulously faithful, word-for-word adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist’s 1808 novella of the same name, set in the early years of the Napoleonic Wars, shot with a cast of German speakers, working in their native tongue, largely recruited from West Berlin’s Schaubühne theater, and filmed in Bavaria in the Virnsberg citadel and the cities of Obernzenn and Ansbach. While The Marquise of O represented a departure from the Moral Tales, it was not so radical a break as that of Perceval. Pursuing a stated mission of “absolute fidelity to the period” in his German adventure, Rohmer sought “a realism—a naturalness—that is particularly cinematic and even, if I may say so, ‘New Wave,’” and, working alongside cinematographer Néstor Almendros, his regular collaborator since 1967’s La Collectionneuse, allowed himself to be guided in decisions of framing, scheduling, and so forth by the whims of natural light, in what was by then the duo’s established practice. “It was not me,” Almendros later wrote in his working autobiography A Man with a Camera, “but an 18th-century architect who designed the lighting for this film. I could paraphrase Picasso and say that in this work I didn’t invent, I found.”

By contrast, Perceval was to be almost entirely invented. While it was Rohmer’s stated belief that enough of Europe of the end of the 18th century had survived into the late 20th to allow for the filming of The Marquise of O in extant locations, the same could not be said of the 1100s, when de Troyes lived and wrote. When dealing with the Middle Ages, of which no “accurate” visual representation remains, Rohmer would allow himself to part completely from the tenets of naturalism as commonly understood. More than the luminous interiors of The Marquise of O, the hermetic world of Perceval, with its curved, blue-painted cyclorama sky and peasants seeding barren concrete fields, resembles that of Rohmer’s other von Kleist film—if “film” one considers it—a record of his stage production of the author’s five-act Catherine de Heilbronn as performed by a cast that included six members of the Perceval troupe in late 1979 at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre as part of the Festival d’Automne, recorded for posterity and for broadcast on Antenne 2. They are akin in their medieval settings, in their employment of young actors giving stylized performances of lyric, anti-naturalistic dialogue—von Kleist’s drama alternates between passages in verse and prose—and in the total artifice of their decor, with Catherine staged against jagged backdrops of cut polystyrene.

For Rohmer, singular in his awareness of cinema’s place in the history of the arts, the approach to every one of his period films set in a world before Niépce, Daguerre, and the photographic image—to those already mentioned we can add 2001’s The Lady and the Duke and 2007’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon—meant a total immersion in the visual culture of the era represented. (In the case of the last-named film, not that of 5th-century Gaul, where it lays its scene, but of the idealized pastoral painting of the same 17th-century culture that also produced Honoré d’Urfé’s source novel.) Preparing for his first journey into the past with The Marquise of O, he had embarked on a study of painting, per biographers Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, of “the German neoclassical school influenced by Jacques-Louis David,” and in one scene asked actress Edith Clever to approximate the pose of limp surrender struck by the female subject of The Nightmare, a 1781 painting by Zurich-born Johann Heinrich Füssli, known as Henry Fuseli in his adoptive home of England. The disappointing results, Rohmer would say, “amply proved… that one mustn’t try to imitate paintings” in cinema—a conviction that remained in place even during the filming of The Lady and the Duke, Rohmer’s other great studio-bound feature, in which the filmmaker provided a fanciful recreation of Revolutionary Paris by digitally superimposing performers onto painted backdrops that, while drawing inspiration from the canvases and engravings that come down to us from the period depicted, were in fact original works by Jean-Baptiste Marot.

Perceval le Gallois (1978)

As in The Lady and the Duke, Rohmer’s intention with Perceval was to invoke a pictorial tradition, not to reproduce it in the manner of, say, a Peter Greenaway. For his film of 2001, Rohmer took figures little-remembered outside of art history circles as his masters: Hubert Robert, Jean-Baptiste Lallemand, Pierre-Antonie Demachy. For his Romance of 2007, bucolic canvases by Paolo Veronese and Simon Vouet acted as guides. In the case of Perceval, the artists consulted were mostly anonymous, the tradition in question being that of the miniatures illustrating medieval illuminated manuscripts. (A fragmentary illuminated manuscript of de Troyes’s poetry, MS Garrett 125, is in the collection of Princeton University Library.) Rohmer, Almendros would recall,

wanted the lighting to be neither realistic nor atmospheric nor impressionistic (“no clouds of dust, no mists”). He preferred lighting without shadows: in medieval miniatures there are only colors and shapes, and medieval artists were unaware of the notion of light, volume, and perspective. From the figures in the foreground to the tiny silhouettes in the background, everything had to be in focus, since the notion of pictorially blurred backgrounds does not appear until much later in the history of the plastic arts.

The example of the miniature would influence Kohut-Svelko’s sets, with their sense of scale baffling to the modern eye; the castles and keeps that Perceval travels between, distinguishable from one another only by the standards displayed outside their gates, would seem undersized on your average tot lot, and hardly capable of containing the fortified cities we find within. It would also be impressed on the gestural vocabulary of the performers who, over the course of a year’s rehearsals, were made accustomed to keeping their hands raised and spread wide with elbows close to their waists. (Rohmer’s international fame was great enough at this point to merit a six-page piece in Film Comment, prior to the commencement of filming, in which he discusses at length his aims for the film and pre-production process.) He did not, however, ask his actors to wear the inscrutable countenances of Byzantine saints, often pointed to as a key reference for the outwardly affectless performance style developed by Robert Bresson, who’d released his own film culled from Arthurian lore, Lancelot du Lac, in 1974. Rohmer’s bright, spruce medieval world is above all charming, remarkable for its absence of dungeon chill, clinging mud, and pestilential squalor—not entirely a matter of idealization according to Almendros, who would note that:

Nowadays many period films are shot in real castles which, however, have been greatly altered by the passage of time. In the Middle Ages these castles had not yet aged, and furthermore they were polychrome. In other words, historical films produced in natural settings as they are today are not for that reason realistic. Rohmer’s stylization probably takes us nearer to the Middle Ages than those epigones of realism with their falsely historical reconstructions.

Relations between Almendros and Rohmer, however, were not entirely harmonious before and during the fraught filming of Perceval, a film whose shooting schedule was slashed from 14 weeks to seven with little time to go before its start date. Inspired by G.R. Aldo’s radically modern approach to outdoor photography on Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema (1948) during his studies at Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, honing his craft in documentaries and a French cinema where the post-Nouvelle vague, out-in-the-streets ethos had triumphed, Almendros, who did a great deal of his work with nothing more than mirrors and bounce cards, was now being asked to bathe in glaring light a wholly contrived world confined within the walls of a studio bunker, nary a single ray of sun to guide his decision-making process, on a project closer to Marcel Carné’s Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942) than to Italian neorealism, and an undertaking Almendros recalls as “certainly the most arduous in my professional life.”

Perceval le Gallois (1978)

Rohmer’s forays into medievalism in Perceval and Catherine de Heilbronn remain aberrations in his career, though they do act as a bridge of sorts to its next act. His knights and damsels are young and impetuous and, in the case of Perceval, terribly raw, closer to the subjects of the Comedies and Proverbs than the somewhat more worldly ones of the Moral Tales. (It is worth noting that neither Perceval nor Gawain ever seem particularly hard pressed in close combat; their difficulties, as those of Rohmer’s middle-class Frenchmen and -women, are largely self-imposed, springing from impetuousness or miscommunication.) Many of the players in the Comedies and Proverbs, moreover, first appeared for Rohmer in chain mail or trumpet sleeves. Featured along with Luchini in both medieval productions there is the Franco-American actress Arielle Dombasle, here as Blanchefleur, the damsel whose household Perceval delivers from starvation-by-siege and the buxom cousin of Pauline at the Beach (1983); Marie Rivière, later to appear in a further seven Rohmer features; and Pascal Ogier, Rivière’s co-star in Jean-Claude Brisseau’s 1978 La vie comme ça, filling multiple small roles in Perceval, who would be posthumously nominated for a César Award for her performance in Rohmer’s Full Moon in Paris (1984) following her death from a likely drug-induced heart attack at age 25.

Another macabre note: Coco Ducados, who plays the witchy wench with towering, spiked dreadlocks who upbraids Perceval for his failure to speak up upon setting eyes on the Grail, would become the second wife of Rohmer’s old friend Gégauff, who she fatally stabbed during an argument on Christmas Eve, 1983. (His famous last words: “Kill me if you want, but stop bothering me.”) The placement of this scene, conflating two passages in de Troyes where women confront Perceval with inauspicious auguries, represents one of very few significant alterations to the first two-thirds of the text that Rohmer’s film covers; another comes after the brief, final return to the tale of Perceval, sidelined for a time by that of Gawain, which leaps forward fully five years to find our hero in a state of amnesiac apostasy, having forgotten God in the course of his tireless questing. Coming across a group of barefoot penitents on Good Friday, Perceval is compelled to visit a nearby hermit and there make amends for his sins, chief among these his callous abandonment of his mother, now long dead, in pursuit of martial glory.

The final reference to Perceval in de Troyes’s text, beyond which Rohmer’s narrative does not proceed, informs his reader that “Perceval acknowledged that God was crucified and died on Good Friday. On Easter Sunday Perceval very worthily received communion.” Rohmer goes rather beyond this, presenting a 12-minute production of the Passion Play, with Luchini in the role of the mutilated and murdered Christ, all accompanied by a male quartet raising their voices in Latin, a language heard nowhere else in the film. The scene is staged in a rounded Romanesque apse, the harried Jesus seen carrying his cross in a looping route before his persecutors, stumbling twice at precisely the same spot, all perfectly in keeping with the circularity of Perceval, a film whose circumscribed hero does not light out to discover new worlds but rather rotates about in the same enclosed space, the same familiar gilded castle recurring as regularly as a scratch on a revolving LP.

The “rounded” quality of Perceval’s settings serve a pictoral purpose—per de Baecque and Herpe, it was a means to “[transpose] onto the horizontal plane Romanesque painting’s effect of vertical curvature”—but also a narrative or even philosophical one. The climactic Passion Play can be, and has been, interpreted as a final image Perceval’s salvation, but this interpretation is made somewhat less convincing by what follows, as we see the knight again mounted on his steed, back turned to the camera, riding off to resume his journey, another turn around the riding ring, into a world where opportunities for corruption outweigh those for redemption. This is not the despairing coda of Bresson’s Lancelot, which concludes with the Grail lost, the round table sundered, and Camelot fallen, but neither is it a note of absolute affirmation. Based on an unfinished work—its composition ended, it is speculated, either by the death of the author or that of his patron, Philip, Count of Flanders—Rohmer’s film is necessarily inconclusive, and what its “ending” suggests could well be described with a line from a film by one of its director’s former Cahiers colleagues, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 Made in U.S.A.: “We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves.”

Perceval le Gallois (1978)