In short, there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here
In Camelot.
Lyrics from the song “Camelot” from the musical Camelot

Don’t even think about seeing this film until you’ve acquainted yourself with the Arthurian legend in the form of either the musical Camelot or the film Excalibar (1981) from director John Boorman. Why, you ask? Well, you can’t debunk mythology until you’ve first bunked it, so to speak. Robert Bresson’s Lancelot of the Lake (1974) (Le Graal was the French title) is all about reducing the magic and mystery of Camelot to just so much misguided adventurism, petty bickering, lifeless romance, rotting corpses, and clanking armor. No glory but plenty of guts. This is Camelot as it might have been recorded secretly by Merlin using a home movie camera absconded from the future by the old magician’s shenanigans, without so much as reminding the participants to shower first.

Historical Background: There really was a King Arthur (as if you really care). Little is known of him except that he was King of Britain. He was son of King Uther Pendragon, grandson of Constantine II (King of Britain), and great-grandson of Constantine I (Emperor of Rome) and Helen of the Cross (248-328 A.D.). Helen of the Cross is the closest relative of King Arthur for whom there are firm dates, so you can guestimate Arthur’s era from there. King Arthur was supposedly fighting German invaders on the British isles as late as the early 500’s. King Arthur was ancient history, practically, not the Dark Ages as many viewers assume. Now the reason I happen to know all this is because Helen’s paternal grandmother (Arthur’s triple-great grandmother), Gladys the Younger, was sister of my ancestor, Cadwalladr, making King Arthur my fifth cousin approximately 65 times removed! That’s why he let’s me call him Artie. Even as I write these words, I’m enjoying my afternoon cup of coffee from the Holy Grail itself.

What we today know as King Arthur was otherwise a fabrication of literature, albeit a colorful and appealing mythos. Some dude known as Chrétien de Troyes started the explosion of creative hyperbole with his mention of the Knights of the Round Table, the infidelity of Guinevere, and the quest for the Holy Grail, which was then amplified by dozens (if not hundreds) of English and French poets and novelists over a thousand years in the telling, reaching its apex with Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470) or, some might argue, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). According to legend, Arthur’s mother was Igrayne, the wife of the Duke of Cornwall, with whom Arthur’s father King Uther Pendragon fell in love. Uther had the Celtic magician Merlin transform him for a night into a Duke of Cornwall look-alike long enough to inseminate the comely Igrayne. That’s even sneakier than a date-rape drug. It was for that reason that Arthur later had to prove himself the rightful heir to the throne by removing the great sword Ex Calibar from a block of stone. These days, it would be DNA analysis and a lot less poetic. Camelot, Arthur’s favorite castle, was located in what is now southern England.

The Story: Bresson picks up the story while Camelot is already in its declining days. The surviving knights (which are only a few of those who set out) are returning from an unsuccessful quest for the Holy Grail. The film opens with some rather graphic violence. One knight is decapitated in a gush of blood, another is stabbed clean through in the groin (with the usual comic grunt that only men truly understand), a couple of others are seen hung from a tree as mere skeletons in armor, and two other corpses in armor are seen smoldering beside a burning dwelling. Back at Camelot, the remaining knights are demoralized and lacking focus. King Arthur (Vladmir Antolek-Oresk) tells Lancelot (Luc Simon) and Gawain (Humbert Balsan) (Lancelot’s loyal friend and nephew of the King) that he is thinking of closing the chamber housing the famous round table because the many empty chairs remind him painfully of old friends lost.

Lancelot has another problem as well. He has convinced himself that the failure of the knights’ mission to find the Holy Grail was God’s punishment for his affair with Guinevere (Laura Duke Condominas). He wants to end the illicit relationship and has vowed to God to do so. Guinevere will have none of it, however, reminding him of his earlier vow of unending love to her. The honorable Lancelot finds himself being drawn and quartered between two mutually exclusive vows. Then, a third problem for both Lancelot and Guinevere is the backbiting Sir Mordred (Patrick Bernhard), a knight of dubious courage but unfailing instincts for self-preservation. Mordred opposed the knights’ fanatical quest for the Holy Grail and resents King Arthur attending to the counsel of Lancelot in preference to his own. Lancelot tries to honor the King’s request that the knights bury their old animosities, offering Mordred his hand in friendship, but is refused. Mordred has other plans – namely, exposing Lancelot’s affair with Guinevere (of which King Arthur is unaware), so that Mordred can eliminate his rival and gain the King’s ear.

A jousting tournament is scheduled pitting Arthur’s knights against those of another castle. Guinevere urges Lancelot not to compete and to use the opportunity for a sexual tryst with her. Lancelot initially agrees and we see Guinevere primping herself for an afternoon of sex in a scene featuring backside nudity. Lancelot’s reputation is taking a hit with the other knights due to his failure to sign up for the tournament and his pride as a knight finally gets the best of him. He stands up Guinevere and, instead, shows up unannounced at the tournament as an unidentified knight in white armor. He proceeds to out-joust a succession of the tourney’s best, one after another, and emerges the victor, though himself wounded by a non-mortal blow to the side of the rib cage. He collapses in the woods and is found and nursed back to life by an old peasant woman. When he has only partly healed, he insists of suiting up again to ride to Guinevere’s rescue, prompting the old woman to rather shrewdly opine, “You are stupid and will never understand anything.”

Lancelot rescues Guinevere from her incarceration by Arthur (who has been listening to the rumors of infidelity) at Camelot and neither Mordred nor his henchmen dare confront the superior knight. King Arthur, however, is not about to sit for his Queen being abducted and lays siege to Lancelot’s castle. Lancelot and those loyal to him are prepared to take the battle to Arthur’s superior force, but Guinevere prefers to sacrifice her love for Lancelot than his life, and demands that Lancelot allow her to return to Arthur. No sooner has this exchange taken place than both sides learn that Mordred has used the opportunity provided by Arthur’s distraction to stage a coup. The ever loyal and noble (if idiotic) Lancelot and his men immediately mount up to fight alongside King Arthur against Mordred. The cumbersome knights soon discover, however, that their day has come and gone, when they encounter tree-mounted archers, who easily shoot the knights and their mounts from a distance. The film ends with a pile of dead knights in their armor piled up like so many old tin cans at a junkyard.

Themes: It is often said that we need our legends and our myths to inspire us as we trudge through our mundane ordinary lives. Men and boys, in particular, seem to desire and thrive on legends of mythic warriors who battle one another or other fearsome threats out of a sense of duty, honor, courage, and chivalry. Whether its knights of the round table, samurai warriors, jedi knights, or pro-wrestlers makes little difference. These are presented to young men in our society as characters worthy of inspiration and emulation. In Sir Thomas Malory’s version of the King Arthur legend, Camelot is all about chivalry, glory, romance, and male camaraderie. This rose-tinted view is pretty well captured in the lyrics of the musical version:

Don't let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment that was known
As Camelot.

Bresson provides an interesting alternative take (diametrically opposed, in fact) on the legend. His is a deconstructionist view that demythologizes Camelot. The film opens not with heroic exploits but with several of the knights rampaging and pillaging. These “heroes”, as presented by Bresson, are what today we would call career criminals – thieves and murderers. The returning knights are then revealed as envious of one another, prideful, and deceitful. Lancelot, himself, is portrayed as haunted by guilt and superstition and egocentric to such an extent that he attributes all successes and failures of the knights collectively to his own morality or lack thereof. The golden romance between Lancelot and Guinevere of the musical or Malory’s legend is reduced to little more than an ice water cold struggle to keep an old adulterous affair afloat. King Arthur is portrayed as weak and indecisive and having foolishly tied the destiny of his knights to a hopeless quest for the Grail. As the old peasant lady says, these knights are stupid and will never understand anything. To be honest, I imagine that Bresson’s depiction of life in 500 A.D. is closer to the truth of the matter than the Sir Thomas Malory version. It is also a wiser understanding for young males in modern society to have about the true consequences of a life of violent conflict. But is it more entertaining or more satisfying storytelling? Heck, no! We love our delusional myths of honor and chivalry even if they are total bunk.

Most Bresson works are highly spiritual even if not in a conventionally religious way. Bresson, though he sometimes characterized himself as agnostic, was inspired by the Jansenist heretical brand of Catholicism that emphasized predestination, divine grace, and original sin. Lancelot of the Lake is less obviously spiritual than most other Bresson works though no less bleak and troubled.

Production Values: Lancelot of the Lake is less slow and deliberate than most Bresson works though the emphasis is still on day by day kinds of activities like getting into and out of armor, putting the horses up in the stable, bathing, and the like. In fact, a lot of this film could be said to be about simple bodily movements. There are many shots of limbs of both people and horses. The most extreme example of this in the film is so utterly extreme that virtually every reviewer has to comment on it. During the entire six minute sequence at the knights’ tournament, the jousting is photographed at an oblique and downward angle with only the body and the legs of the horse and the legs of the rider visible on screen. He hear the lance hits and the groans of the knights but never see what’s happening at the head or upper body level. It is really quite a daring shot angle. Is it effective? Yes and no! It’s definitely frustrating not to see the “real” action – the part we usually focus on – but it also forces more focused attention to sounds and leg movements than is typical. I think that the purpose was once again to deglamorize these knights and reduce the events to the mundane. We are shown a lot of horses' asses in this film – in more than one sense.

Bresson gives a lot of play in this film to the auditory sense, as he often does. A lot of off-screen action is given exposition entirely through environmental sounds, especially horses neighing and whinnying, the rhythm of hoof beats on the roadways, clanking armor, knights being buffeted during the jousting tournament, and the soft whispering of the gloomy and forbidding forest. There were numerous trumpet fanfares and very effective use of Scottish bagpipes at the tournament. Once again, though, Bresson chooses to show us only the bagpipes being squeezed and not the face of the musician so that our attention must remain with the sound more than the image. Another interesting ambient sound was the cawing of a crow or raven which, I believe, was also intended as symbolic representation of Merlin.

As in all Bresson films after the first couple, the actors are non-professionals – what Bresson called models – instructed on the niceties of deadpan, inexpressive, emotionless delivery. This fits with Bresson’s demythologizing intent, but it is anti-theatrical and anti-cinematic to an extent that diminishes the film’s entertainment quotient. We don’t typically go to the theater to watch folks no more interesting or attractive than the neighbors. The numerous men in this film were nothing special to look at (except, perhaps, Humbert Balsan as Gawain, if I can even be considered an adequate judge of male attractiveness). Even Laura Duke Condominas as Guinevere was short on glamour and personality, though her derrière was entirely satisfactory for the bathing scene.

Bottom-Line: So, once again we have here a Bresson film featuring austere minimalism, meaning that most of what viewers normally latch onto in their cinematic experiences has been systematically stripped away, forcing viewers into alternative realms of awareness. The enjoyments of fine acting, beautiful personas, and some of the conventional visual thrills one would expect in an action film are absent, but the aural stimulation and attention to intimate details of daily life are elevated. I’m not sure that an adventure story is the ideal vehicle for Bresson’s style but I do like the effectiveness with which he’s debunked the Arthurian myth. It’s not a boring film by any means. Bresson’s effort also loses a bit of its luster given that Monty Python debunked the myth even more effectively a year later in a manner that consistently leaves audiences rolling on the floor in hysterics. Lancelot of the Lake is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 80 minutes.

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age