Lancelot Du Lac

 

They’re having a short season of Bresson films at the South Bank at the moment so I was finally able to see ‘Lancelot Du Lac‘, Bresson’s unique take on the Arthurian myth last night. The film begins toward the end of the tale, just as the Knights have returned from the unsuccessful hunt for the grail, and concerns itself with the adulteress Guinevere and her affair with Lancelot which ultimately leads Mordred to foment the doom and downfall of the entire order.

Quite frankly, this was hard work. This is in some part due to my condition – I was struggling with the after affects of a very late (for a school night) session from the evening before – but in any case the slow narrative, use of repetition, distanced, minimalist acting and sparse stylistics made it very difficult to take the film seriously in light of it’s obvious influence on ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ – certain scenes have been directly parodied by the Pythons such as the early, shocking decapitation in ‘Lancelot’ versus the Black Knight scene, the coconuts  versus Bresson’s sound design with his clatter of horseshoes and automaton knights, and the overall gritty and grim portryal of the medieval era. 

 

That said, it does have some astonishing moments – Bresson builds to crescendo a sequence around a jousting competition and the final ‘battle’ (which is off camera, though you see the gory aftermath) was edited in his uniquely unconventional style. The Camelot depicted here is not the magisterial court of a mythic king as in Boorman’s ‘Excalibur‘, but a sparsely decorated jumble of functional rooms and stables. The round table is just that – a very unassuming and standard round table clustered around which are collected some chairs, not thrones. I’m sure there is a wealth of Catholic and historical imagery that went straight over my head – this is Bresson and after all the film is infused with allusions to transcendence, religious duty versus mortal reality and the battle behind piety and the sins of the flesh – strangely though the grail itself is absent. Overall, I’m glad I finally caught it as it is certainly a film worth pondering over.