Lancelot du Lac [DVD]

Lancelot du Lac is similar to other films by Bresson. The story is presented very fast and efficient: in the intro we are shown a few shots of knights being killed and horsemen riding through the woods: the knights of the round table are on their way home, decimated and having failed in the quest to find the grail. Also, like other films by Bresson, the scenes are usually in small settings or relayed through close ups: we are not given any grand views of castles (just interiors) or landscapes (trees mostly). And the actors are "models", that is they do not act by expressing emotions that explain their actions and show their personalities - instead dialogue are delivered in a monotone way and feelings are barely expressed. This is not intended to be a "realistic" film, and it is far away from the Hollywood dramas or detailed depictions of the middle ages.The core of the film is the return of Lancelot and how this causes conflicts between the knights for and against him, and a moral conflict where Lancelot must decide if he's going to take Guinevere away from king Arthur. It gets quite suspenseful and dramatic, despite the lack of special effects. I like how battles are barely shown: in the tournament we see mostly glimpses of lances and knights repeatedly falling to the ground, and other times we are just shown a short glimpse of a knight with blood flowing from the throat.What I lack in this DVD from AE is extra material (there are none). But considering the excellent transfer and a price under 10GBP it is great value for money anyway. If you're into Bresson or cinema in general, this is a must buy. If you're more into Hollywood films like Robin Hood you may watch this as an interesting alternative way of telling a story.

Set after the failure of the quest for the Holy Grail, the surviving knights of Arthur's legendary round table, return in defeat to their King. The Arthurian legend of the Knights Of The Round Table is given an austere, stripped down exercise in asceticism from director Robert Bresson (DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST). Clearly not interested in the romanticism of the legend, Bresson uses amateur actors (and it shows) who say lines rather than act. Passion, a strong component in the Lancelot and Guinevere portion of the legend, is totally absent. Their fate, as well as everyone around them, is preordained yet they still fight against the inevitable. Even the jousting tournaments are shown in fragments with no tension or excitement. This lacklustre approach, while cerebreally intriguing, makes for a rather sterile film. Bresson introduces characters in pieces. They enter a frame by their legs, their shoulders, their backs as if their faces were irrelevant. Bresson amplifies the sound so that the clanking of their armor sounds like thunder and the neighing of a horse in the distance (repeated so often that it almost becomes a joke) sounds like a scream. The score, what there is of it, is by Philippe Sarde. While I can admire Bresson's intentions (beautifully photographed by Pasqualino De Santis), it's a cold, cold piece of work.The British import courtesy of Artificial Eye is an excellent anamorphic 1.66 transfer.

As I've become something of a fan of French cinema I was expecting more; mainly this is just plain dull with semi robotic performances and uninspired camera work. I plan to give Bresson's work another chance though, starting with 'Pickpocket'.

Lancelot du Lac (1974) was Robert Bresson's 11th feature film and only his third in color. Though it came out to almost universal critical acclaim, it is now one of his most under-appreciated works which people rarely make reference to when talking or writing about the director. Still, at least we can still see the film properly courtesy of this excellent Artificial Eye release. That's more than can be said of his stunning first feature Les Anges du Péchés (1943) and his first two color films, Une femme douce (1969) and Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (1971). All three are in desperate need of being released on DVD - does anyone know why they now seem to be available only on YouTube? At any rate, Lancelot du Lac is for me a masterpiece. It completely achieves what it sets out to do and although it is icy cold when set beside acknowledged masterworks like Pickpocket (1959) and Au hasard Balthazar (1966), its intellectual rigor is equally as impressive and the total effect is as profound as you are ever likely to get in the cinema.At first glance Arthurian legend as related by the 12th century French poet Chrétien de Troyes may seem an unlikely choice of material for Bresson. His films are usually routed in contemporary France even if the literary sources (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Diderot, Bernanos) are not. To date his only period film had been Le Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (1962), and that had been firmly based on historical fact even down to utilizing the transcript from the victim's trial as the screenplay. Nobody expected the austere iconoclastic French director to veer into Camelot (1967) territory. And yet look closely and we see that Lancelot du Lac is as Bressonian as any of his preceding films.Put basically, Bresson's concern was always with the basic metaphysics underpinning the human condition - the reasons we live, the factors that propel human life from birth to death and beyond. As I have outlined in my other Bresson reviews his aesthetic is informed by Catholicism, in his case the peculiar French strain of predestinarian Jansenism. In a Bresson film protagonists function in any given narrative to fulfill whatever has been predestined for them to fulfill. They have no free will of their own and usually the film charts a journey which becomes in effect an unknowing search for spiritual redemption, for grace. Conventional character psychology has no place in a Bresson work - it doesn't matter what happens between life and death, the result will be the same - such is the nature of predestination. Throughout the protagonists will be `acted on' from on high as they are guided towards their fate.In all of Bresson's b/w films up until Mouchette (1967), grace is always found. The protagonists may suffer greatly, but through good means or foul they always achieve a state of redemption. From Une femme douce onwards however, though the characters are acted on from on high and are still fulfilling their already decided destiny, grace is withdrawn and the protagonists finish in a kind of nihilistic abyss. It is as if Bresson withdraws any hope he ever had for the improvement of mankind as he demonstrates with a ruthless intellectual rigor how man has created his own fall. This is precisely what Lancelot du Lac is all about.The narrative structure of the film is split into three clearly identifiable acts. The first sees the knights of the round table return to Camelot from Brittany where they have been searching for the Holy Grail. Their search has been fruitless and they return in disarray, 70 of the 100 knights having died in the process. The most senior knight is Lancelot (Luc Simon) who returns to the arms of Queen Guinevere (Laura Duke Condominas). At first he attempts to stop their affair. It is conflicting with his knightly code of honor consisting of his loyalty to Guinevere's husband King Arthur (Vladimir Antolek-Oresek). However, he is persuaded by the Queen to continue. The `affair' is observed from afar by the other knights who split according to their allegiances. Gawain (Humbert Balsan) and his followers take the side of Lancelot while Mordred (Patrick Bernhard) and his legion take up the King's honor. Act Two consists entirely of a jousting competition between rival knights in which Lancelot says he will participate, but which he actually uses as a diversion to have a tryst with the Queen. One knight dominates the contest. Gawain thinks it is Lancelot after all, but nobody is quite sure. Act Three charts the final split between the knights and how King Arthur, Lancelot and his supporters are ambushed by Mordred's archers in the forest. The film ends with all the knights slaughtered, piled on each other in their armor to resemble a trash heap.Bresson lays his cards on the table right at the beginning of the film with his depiction of the knights in disarray. They wreak havoc on innocent people as churches are ransacked and homes are destroyed. For knights searching for the Holy Grail, their behavior is distinctly un-Christian. They show no brotherly love of man for fellow man and as the first part of the film continues Bresson depicts the knights as an aloof sect, living apart in their lofty castles not concerned at all with the subjects they are supposed to be looking after. There is a brief sequence towards the end of the first part where Lancelot advances towards a crucifix which is blurred just off-center of frame as he addresses it: "Lord, do not forsake us. Do not forsake me. I struggle against a death worse than death. Deliver me from a temptation I can hardly resist". But it is not a question of the Lord abandoning him and the other knights. Actually it is they who have abandoned the Lord. By treating the Holy Grail as a prize to be won in some knightly show of strength, by showing loyalty only to themselves and to their own senses of pride, and (in Lancelot's case) by knowingly committing adultery with the Queen of the land so that the land itself dies, the knights turn their backs on God and any values that can be called `Christian'. In this way, they engineer their own final demise.Rather than Christian values, it is the chivalric code of knightly honor which the knights rigorously adhere to. Bresson demonstrates this code to be empty and meaningless. This is the point of the central jousting competition. Why are these knights attempting to knock each other off their horses with sticks? What is the relevance of this to anything other than a massaging of pride and an attempt to alleviate the boredom of an irrelevant life in a forest? Bresson underlines the pointlessness of it all by his unique way of shooting the sequence, the camera pointing at horses' bodies and parts of the contestants' armor as one by one they bight the dust. We never see who is fighting who, the armor preserving their anonymity and indeed throughout the film Bresson clearly highlights the clunking and the clanking of the armor as the knights strut around Camelot ridiculously still wearing it even when they don't have to. The armor becomes a badge of their irreligious anti-Christian moral code which has complete irrelevance to anyone except themselves. Note the final slaughter where Bresson has the knights one by one pull down their visors before riding into their destruction. They are not people so much as articulators of a corrupt bad code of misplaced honor which is fully worthy of destruction. Thus the final image of the suits of armor piled on top of each other to resemble a trash heap is Bresson's indignant and entirely logical response to a sad and sorry state of existence.Now, you may say what does all this have to do with the human condition especially in the 20th century? Well, the Arthurian legend is a myth and like all myths, it conveys universal truisms which remain constant down through the ages. The search for the Holy Grail is acknowledged as a metaphor for the search for redemption, a search for true faith which we spend our lives pursuing. It is of course especially relevant for Catholics as the grail was the cup held by Joseph of Arimathea which supposedly captured the blood of Jesus Christ as he lay dying on the cross. The cup was later adopted by Catholics for the Holy Communion celebration of the Eucharist. This of course stays relevant to this day. In Lancelot du Lac Bresson is very careful to demonstrate the way the knights violate the 7 Catholic virtues (chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness and humility) in favor of the 7 deadly sins (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride) in the way they go about their business and the story of their demise conveys in microcosm the very same impurities which undermine the human condition to this day. In Au hasard Balthazar and Mouchette Bresson has his main characters negotiate the 7 Stations of the Cross in their life journey which relate the very same impurities. Those films were contemporary and are more obviously relevant, but just because Lancelot du Lac is set in an ancient pre-historical era, it doesn't make the central truisms spelt out in the myth any less so. In fact the film is every bit as Bressonian in theme as the rest of his work.Visually of course, the film is unmistakably 100% Bresson. He employs a new cinematographer in Pasqualino De Santis, but one would never know it. The mise-en-scène remains typically grey, dreary and determinedly unspectacular despite its color presentation. Where battles, the joust and the trysts between Lancelot and Guinevere could have provided for some rip-roaring violent rumpy-pumpy à la Excalibur (1981, John Boorman), Bresson predictably stylizes the violence which is anything but realistic, ignores the crowds of the jousting contest (heard not seen), employs his usual amateur models to `act' expressionless throughout, and points his camera at spaces into which characters move to underline the predetermined fate they are moving towards, focusing on body parts and equipment instead of adhering to the customary Hollywood full-spectacle approach. In this way Bresson forces us to focus on the ideas underlying the narrative rather than the narrative itself, something which is rendered very elliptical especially towards the end. For those not used to Bresson this approach might seem eccentric, bizarre and off-putting, but trust me when I say there is method in his madness. The film demonstrates with crystalline clarity how the pursuit of non-Christian codes and values ends in a nihilistic abyss. This is very fitting for a director whose next film (The Devil Probably [1977]) demonstrates the effects the same neglect of Christian values will have on contemporary France. Both films are equally as bleak and uncompromising about the human condition. Not everyone will buy into this nihilism, but the films (especially Lancelot du Lac) are extraordinary for their beauty and the way Bresson matches theme with presentation to an amazingly precise degree.As I alluded to earlier this AE release is excellent. It is given in the original aspect ratio (16:9 - 1.66:1) with Dolby digital mono sound. There are no extras which is a disappointment. The film is short (81 minutes) and surely an informed documentary could have been added or even a scholarly commentary. Never mind, like all Bresson this is a film which should be seen.

The most clunky (literally) film I have ever seen. The characters all look bored and clank around in their armour from scene to scene, looking like they wished it was all over. Disjointed story and characters that you really couldn't get involved with. Save your money and don't buy this.