Take One (Jan 1979)

Rohmer’s fidelity to the text has not smothered his own personal voice as a filmmaker. Like most of his films, Perceval is a contemplation of such outmoded concepts as faith, honour, love and moral rectitude. And like Jean-Louis Trintignant in My Night at Maud’s, JeanClaude Brialy in Claire's Knee, and Bernard Verley in Chloé in the Afternoon, Fabrice Luchini’s Perceval moves gradually from an initially narrow, selfish view of himself in relation to the world, toward a point approaching a measure of enlightenment. In the earlier Moral Tales, this interior journey is developed through those Platonic dialogues unique to Rohmer. In this film, however, Perceval’s moral and spiritual progression is charted through his picaresque encounters with damsels in distress, renegade knights, a red-eyed Medusa-coiffed Cassandra figure, and such “worthy men” as Gornemant of Gohort and the Fisher King. By the end of the film the well-meaning yet bumbling knight-errant has been transformed into a sober cavalier whose humility and awareness of his own mortality inspire him to climax his quest for the Holy Grail by assuming the suffering of Jesus Christ in a re-enactment of the Passion. Perceval is shot through with the passion and moral commitment Rohmer brought to My Night at Maud’s and Claire's Knee. This film trembles with a religious faith so awesome, so absolute, that even the staunchest atheist might pause. Rohmer also believes deeply in the code of chivalry which informed the Middle Ages. He sees the gallantry and hospitality of the era as holy extensions of the Church, and Perceval’s repeated abuses of these knightly precepts begin to resemble vanity and self-seeking. When Perceval’s lack of perspicacity lets the mystery of the Holy Grail slip Dogs. Director, Burt Brinckerhoff (1976). After the recent spate of films about animals turning really beastly, one doesn’t expect much from this horror subgenre, so Dogs, combining post-Jaws blood-and-guts with a plot reminiscent of Hitchcock’s The Birds, comes as a pleasant, albeit gruesome, surprise. Pet dogs form packs and attack cattle and then people in an isolated college town. The film hints (misleadingly) that some link between secret government linear accelerator research and pheromones (chemical agents secreted by animals to affect others of their species) may be responsible for the dogs’ sudden savagery and apparently heightened intelligence. A reasoned investigation by the two biologist/heroes David McCallum and George Wyner is cut short by a massive canine assault on the college. The situation is left unresolved at the end with 10 TAKE ONE /JANUARY 1979 nk Reema genres: MMR sh through his fingers, Rohmer abruptly deserts his hero at his lowest ebb and digresses to the tale of Sir Gawain, whose efforts to clear his good name return nobility to Arthurian folklore. Performing his deeds of chivalry with the purest of hearts, Gawain personifies the balance of humility, pride, and inner serenity that defines knighthood. Gawain’s interlude restores a moral center to the legend, ‘provides an affirmative contrast with Perceval’s story, and offers a spiritual and emotional foothold for the structural leap Rohmer takes when he plunges his penitent hero into the Passion. Despite the seriousness of its concern, Perceval is consistently witty and invigorating. Rohmer infuses Perceval’s naiveté and misdirected fervor with many humorous touches. For example, Fabrice Luchini’s impatient repetition of his mother’s entreaties and admonishments when he is about to leave home are amusingly thrown away, and the grimace he flashes while fighting the proud Lord of the Heath is comically exaggerated. Rohmer has generously shared his delight in this romance by turning it into a movie that recaptures the awe and magic a child discovers between the pages of his first storybook. Eric Rohmer’s Perceval is an astounding achievement. This seminal film literally extends the boundaries of the cinema. It simultaneously tests the limits of prevailing aesthetic criteria, and pushes most assumption of what constitutes a work of film art into unexplored areas. Perceval is more than an illustration of a medieval text; it is a joyful illumination of Eric Rohmer’s very special universe. George Morris Remember My Name An unusually sympathetic approach Alan Rudolph’s new movie Remember My Name is a film “about the blues” as he claims, so it was only fitting that its October premiere was in Memphis, Tennessee—the birthplace of the blues, of W.C. Handy, of Beale Street, and of Alberta Hunter, who wrote the film’s score. Ostensibly, the opening was held there in her honor, so Columbia Pictures flew down and subsequently feted several journalists (including me) in classic press junket style, and had celebrities on hand as well. Chief among the bigshots was the film’s producer Robert Altman, who OVERLOOKED & UNDERRATED McCallum and girlfriend Sandra McCabe apparently the only survivors in town, more dog attacks reported throughout the state, and the implication that the cats are waiting for their turn. The script by O'Brian Tomalin is literate, with a minimum of plot holes, and the horror is intensified by the inclusion of smaller housedogs (including a Benji look-alike) in the packs in addition to the expected German shepherds and Dobermans. Some scenes (for example, a well-written but poorly acted faculty cocktail party) should have been handled better, but most are good, and several are gems—as when Wyner tries to save his formerly skeptical dean from an attack by his own setter and shoots the dean instead of the dog. Despite its obviously low budget, Dogs is probably the best film of this kind next to The Birds. Richard J. Leskosky to a genre noted for endemic pulpiness. frankly admitted that his Lionsgate enterprise bypassed a New York premiere because his own movie (A Wedding) was getting killed there by reviews, and he feared more of the same fate. He was rather pleased to discover that the downhome Memphians really liked Remember My Name, and to date it is still the only city in the U.S. where it can be viewed. But perhaps the nicest surprise was that Alan Rudolph really is an Altman protegé, and not his clone. Unlike Rudolph’s last movie Welcome To L.A., which gleefully plundered Nashville for themes, atmosphere and even personnel, Remember My Name leans on forties film noir for inspiration, but succeeds by a singular combination of _ traditional narrative and contemporary psychodrama. It’s a detective story without detectives, at least on the screen. Instead, the audience is assigned the role, sifting through various clues and sundry improvisatory passages until the very end of the film when the motives of its hardbitten central figure, Emily (Geraldine Chaplin), become obvious. Rudolph wants to create an understanding for his protagonists, particularly Emily. It’s an unusually sympathetic approach to a genre generally noted for endemic pulpiness, and Rudolph nearly achieves a dimensionality for mystery movies that Altman realized for westerns with McCabe and Mrs. Miller. In Remember My Name, Emily has just spent a dozen years in prison for mur