In perusing Robert Bresson’s catalogue, I’ve discovered that after his fifth picture, Pickpocket, the aesthetic rigor of his work becomes increasingly cerebral and ascetic. His first three films that applied his austere directorial approach all dealt with existential themes and were equally admirable as they were enjoyable. Beginning with The Trial of Joan of Arc, though, his self-professed principles—phlegmatic performances, visual austerity, eschewal of psychology—seemed to have become not only guidelines but obstructions, too. As a result, his first three forays into color film, Une Femme Douce, Four Nights of a Dreamer, and Lancelot du Lac all feel much more venerable in theory and on paper than in front of the eyes and ears.
Taking the Medieval tale of Lancelot and King Arthur’s Round Table and removing all elements scandalous, heroic, and romantic, Bresson instead subverts the glory of warfare and pits the respective loyalties to God, one’s King, and one’s lover against one another, as his eponymous protagonist struggles to become a religious man despite his natural superiorities of mind and strength. In the movie’s abruptly jarring opening scene (certainly one of Bresson’s most adept tools), the hand-to-hand combat of two knights is represented as an anonymous clash of metal on metal, only given humanity when one soldier’s head is lopped off and the camera trains on the blood flowing from the stump of his neck, more repugnant than sensational. Subsequent shots catch hanging skeletons and fallen corpses before mobilizing drums hark introduce a short historical prologue. The stolid preface functions as a sober look at war, in the same spirit as Godard’s Les Carabiniers.
Despite the habitual aesthetic force of his opening scenes, Bresson tends to back off such lurid (relatively speaking) bravado and retreat to the stringency of more alienating mode of storytelling, in which the merit is, for me at least, primarily theoretical. Compared to his prior color films, Lancelot du Lac is both available in a much better transfer and contains more action, lending it a relative upper hand. In a climactic jousting competition, Bresson unsurprisingly represents the combat with clipped images of feet and escutcheon, with the vocal reaction of the off-screen crowd indicating the results. A mesmeric repetition is achieved in this way, but is somewhat compromised by a rapid-fire montage to cap the tournament. But most of the picture offers both less to quibble over or get excited about. As with several of his other films, I’m willing to buy his rhetoric but ambivalent about its demonstration.
Grade: Worth a Look.
New York Film Festival, 1974
The Defeatist Completist 