Rare is a film like Eugène Green’s Le Monde Vivant (The Living World), one of such humor, wit, whimsy, and spirit told in a mode so strict, formal, and minimal. It is a fable, or a fairy tale, or a certain way of looking at reality if you like, but it is impossible not to suggest a child-friendly and cheerful homage to Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac. The Bresson comparison is inevitable, what with Green’s frank simplicity in framing, his deliberating speaking and minimally performing actors (resembling Bresson’s “models”), and most importantly his respect not just for each individual shot, movement, and line of dialog, but in the accumulation of these things. There is, for example, in Le Monde Vivant one of the most magical sequences I have seen in a film, where with single, unmoving shots a knight finds a damsel being held captive in a chapel and he leaps up to her tower window to save her. This is told by: a shot of a hand and arm reaching outside a window (at first a horrible image, like something from Dreyer’s Vampyr), a shot of feet going tiptoe and leaving the ground slowly, a shot of the two hands holding lightly, as if shaking, and then releasing, a shot of the knight halfway inside the window, and finally a shot of the feet landing on the wooden chapel floor. Taiwanese martial-arts master King Hu meets Bresson in a fairy tale?

But let us not forget the formalism of the film is most playful; this is, after all, a chivalrous tale where the knights wear collared shirts and blue jeans (they are defined only by the sword they wear), and things are so because people say they are. This is the principle theme of the film, the spiritual power of the word manifest into real life, where belief is conjured into actuality, where saying one’s golden retriever is a lion makes it a lion (and its owner, wearing a sword, is, therefore, the Lion Knight). Friendship, pledges, evil, love and death are all bound by the word, and it is the director’s inspiration to place such a potentially weighty spiritual theme side by side such rank playfulness that the film feels so tonally intact as a whimsical spiritual journey. Everything is decidedly lo-fi, charmingly so, where a talking tree’s arms are human arms covered in moss, and the contrast between modern day accoutrements and castle settings, just like the contrast between the film’s sense of wit and fun with its actors purity of earnestness in their acting makes the film feel at once a pithy trifle and perhaps something great. The Bressonian feel goes a long way to make the film seem like it should be taken with the utmost seriousness, at the same time this very stylistic simplicity is what makes the scenario so cute. Perhaps it is in the implicit link between the importance of the said word in the fable, and in the cinema of the revelatory power of the shot—for Green’s style is certainly based on an emphasis, minimalistic though it is, of each and every shot—that the film’s own cuteness leads gracefully into an emotion and a meaning beyond its highly charming conceits.