Metrograph

Rohmer, best known as the doyen of French naturalism, veered about as far as you could get from his signature style with this adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes’s 12th-century Arthurian romance Perceval, the Story of the Grail, in which Fabrice Luchini’s Perceval crosses a deliberately artificial landscape of cardboard castles and fiberglass rivers, all built in the Epinay Studios near Paris, in search of the Cup of Christ, his journey periodically described by a singing chorus. Of his work on this extremely visually distinctive project, cinematographer Néstor Almendros would later write: “There was not a glimmer of natural light, and everything had to be reconstructed, or rather invented… [Rohmer] 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.”

Distributor: Les Films du Losange