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Customer Reviews of Lancelot of the Lake

Another gem of the master of masters!
Bresson once more offers us his particular gaze about the Legend of The King Arthur and the Holly grial.
The script is a journey to explore without restrictions a bitter sight to the decline , the decadence and the loss of the epic sense of the life , majesty and the deep hole of uncertainity and dissapointment around the values that once were .
The tale is always permeated of a dark poetry . The images don't reflect the state of the honor . You only watch the loyalty from a perverse angle.

Watch for instance the glorious and countless sequences in which we never see the horses' faces . Bresson employed that smart device in previous films like Joan of Arc , for instance , in which we never see the faces of the executioners or A man escapes where the nazi officers faces are always hidden in a clever mix of blame and betray .
The film is loaded with countless poetic images and a clear resources economy. Bresson is concerned more in what we must imagine that in what we can see. He introduces us in a mythical journey , but at last with the fall of the last warrior and the unforgettable and awful sequence of the iron skeletons make useless any word , and the powerful images talk by themselves.
Bresson employs the words in the its exact meaning ; he avoids long speechs ; he goes to the images , whose expresiveness go far beyond any kind of language.
With the glorious exception of Andrei Tarkovsky no other film maker has employed so wisely the visual language to express with such deepness and beauty the powerful of his message.
The meaning value of the genius is that he's like anyone , but anyone is like him.

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Old Legend , New Content
The Arthurian Legend is the most interesting and powerful blend of Christian virtue and Medieval valor in literature. In Bressons hands, however, the search for the Holy Grail does not inspire acts of virtue or valor. In fact the search proves to be quite demoralising and leads to a lot of infighting. Once faith is lost so is unity and all that is left is a grab for power. Arthur is barely a character, he simply is the one who is slightly older and has slightly shorter hair and wears a crown. Lancelot is a kind of Hamlet who can't decide what he stands for. He loves Guinevere but he wants to do what is right for the kingdom as well. Ultimately he does the right thing and returns her to the king but too late--the favoritism shown him by both Queen and King has turned him into a target to the other Knights. Mordred is his most powerful detractor and the more Lancelot wavers the stronger and more resolute he becomes. In subverting the Arthurian legend or secularising it Bresson has turned the story into a Shakespearean tragedy about loyalty and betrayal. He's turned a story which dealt in absolutes (or at least in a search for absolutes)where people are defined by actions which can be deemed good or bad into a story which deals only in relative truths where all acts are marked with uncertainty and doubt. He's turned an old story into a new one.

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Truth As Hero
This film is worth owning for the unique power of its unusual color/lighting/setting alone. The beautiful, flat density of the intense color ( a paradox that reflects the essential meaning of the film ) and the penetrating graininess of the light are the result of intensity filtered through a 50mm lens. Bresson was a master of his craft. But on the other hand, it would be a mistake to think that the purpose of this aspect of the film could be grasped apart from the film as a whole.
One of the most immediately striking aspects of this film is the continual feeling of profound potential that is never realized. It gives the film a pervasive living-death-like atmosphere which its color and lighting deeply accentuate. This sense of potential comes from the fact that we are watching the story of the search for the Holy Grail (the salvation of humanity), or rather the story of the failed search for the Holy Grail. For Bresson, the conventional heroics and grandeur associated with this story are the result of its potential combined with a projection of its success which in fact is not real, has not been realized. These conventions are a mere fiction and therefore illusory. Bresson strips the story, with his usual care and precision in the unexpected perspective and image, of all this fiction, but does not deny the potential. The result is a vision of a haunted world. The scenes of the knights in the forest are astonishing mixtures of profound potential and lifeless failure. Together they create a vision that is unforgettable. This is art that has no interest in the comforts of fiction, but only in its own capacity for revelation. The hero here is not Lancelot, but the denied truth itself. Highly recommended.