Word: knightly
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...story is adapted from the narrative of the 12th century French poet Chrétien de Troyes, who wrote the first formal version of the Grail legend. Perceval (Fabrice Luchini), a Welsh lad of sublime simplicity, encounters five knights galloping after distressed damsels. At first he takes the warriors for angels, but when he learns they are men like him self, he sets out to find King Arthur, that famous knight maker. Perceval's mother had told him to help ladies in trouble but to expect no more than a kiss, and perhaps a ring, in return. He misreads...
Eventually he finds Arthur (Marc Eyraud), who is in a sulk because the Red Knight is trying to seize his land. Perceval puts a spear through the fellow's eye, and Arthur dubs him the new Red Knight. Various adventures follow, with Perceval rescuing maidens, downing oppressors and entering enchanted houses. Invariably, however, he misconstrues good advice. When he does see the Holy Grail, he does not recognize it or ask about it, having been told by a wise old man that a good knight keeps his mouth shut. For that error he is cursed. He has become...
Rohmer's telling of the story is highly stylized. The actors speak in rhyming verse, and much of the narrative is provided by a chorus, playing medieval instruments. Luchini is more a suggestion of a knight than a knight himself. With a receding chin, concave chest, and dangling, half-open mouth, he looks as if he would be afraid to kill a mouse with a trap, much less joust with a man in armor. The sets are also symbolic, rather than realistic-sculptured trees, cardboard castles, painted skies-and they have the strange beauty of a Dali painting...
...certainly increased the decible level. Danehy has been leading the fight against the MBTA since it started and he maintains that the MBTA is out to force this project on the Cambridge community, any way it can. Cambridge is his lifelong home and Danehy pictures himself as the knight in shining armor, come to save the innocent maiden. Like others, the mayor can perceive the long-term advantages that extension offers but he hesitates to sanction the "destruction of Mass. Ave. for five years or more...
...good moments were too few and too far between, and even they were soured by embarrassing sequences such as the White Knight's and the Fawn's, both played by Ben Schatz, when the script, music and acting combined to explore the depths of gooey and contrived sentiment. The Fawn sequence was marred not so much by the flowery romanticism of the song as by the Fawn's weird behavior upon discovering that Alice is a human child. He runs off stage acting as if he were trying to keep himself from commiting an unnatural act, and only the most...