Lancelot of the Lake

Rating:
Summary: Another gem of the master of masters!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: It's not for everyone...
Review: French director Robert Bresson crafts this grim, anti-romantic, and super-artsy, somewhat low-budget deconstruction of the Arthurian legend. As the films begins, the Knights return from a futile and spectacularly failed attempt to find the Holy Grail; Arthur's Camelot is a miserable, somewhat grubby encampment -- when riders from a neighboring hamlet come to challenge the remnants of Arthur's army to a jousting tournament, one senses that the "king" has lost his power amid a cloud of failure, impotence and doubt. In terms of the story itself, in how Bresson subverts and undercuts the glamour of legend, this is an interesting film. However, as an actual movie, it's rather stilted and pretentious, and not very enjoyable, outside of the ironic intellectual and filmic parameters set by the director. It's practically a "dogme" film: the sound design is rather poor, and the camera work is (purposefully) irritating: the film's lasting motif is the constant tracking of legs -- the stockinged legs of the knights as they slowly traipse about, the legs of their horses which are shown in place of the action when the warriors ride to battle. For much of the film, visually speaking, the actors do not exist above the waist... it's an artsy break with cinematic convention that's meant to wow films students and which mimics the loftiness of the direction. Cool for academics, I suppose, but if you're looking for a sword-'n'-sandals flick, this one might really bug you. I'm sure the guys from Monty Python must have been lampooning this when they made "Holy Grail," but for many viewers, Bresson's version will seem funny-bad enough.

Rating:
Summary: Bad folks..really really humorously bad
Review: Ok- listen..I realize there are people out there who. on the strength of a director's name or past accomplishments, will laud any and every attempt at 'ART'. The other reviews of this barking French Dog of an Art film are fawning in the extreme. This is the worst film I've seen in years. Rare is the film that that is so bad that you collapse in tears of laughter. It's quite as if an elementary school film class got hold of good equipment, managed to slip the entire cast prozac and ex-lax and then proceeded to film all the characters from the neck down. There are stunning shots of horses legs, men's legs, chain mail butts and the occasional shot of a horses eye. This had some significance to someone- but was laughable as anything other than a skewed attempt at symbolism.The battle scenes were the best of the bad- the red paint spewed out of the fake neck of an armored mannequin was hand pumped- and yes..the fake dime store plastic arrow glued to the head of the obviously frightened and probably sedated horse almost killed me with laughter. Every film student should buy this DVD and watch in over and over and take extensive notes on HOW NOT TO MAKE AN ART FILM. Jeez- I'm sorry..but the most remarkable thing about this film is that ANYONE actually spent money making it. This ART film makes Plan 9 From Outer Space look like Shakespeare.

Rating:
Summary: Old Legend , New Content
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A Magnificent Study of Honor
Review: The story of Lancelot is one of loyalty, and who better to agonizingly dissect such a concept than Robert Bresson? His film is an investigation of the conceits of "unifying poetic myth," and none of the values allegedly transmitted through shared tradition emerge without the taint of flawed humanity. As always, Bresson darkens and reduces: Arthur is an anti-figure, Camelot is stark and roughhewn (though it is never dwelt upon, his vision of the round table, and the chairs around the table, are to my mind as stunning a bit of set design as you will ever find), nowhere does magic or myth pervade the storyline. The camera moves with guilty severity, Guenivere is near comatose, a voice of (t?)reason frozen in rigid profile. There is no "spectacle" (the famous jousting sequence is consciously anti-spectacular, but still a riveting use of camera and sound), the sumptuous beauty of the film comes from Bresson's compositions of human figures, stark lighting, and muddy green-brown colors. Lancelot du Lac is a magnificent, beautiful movie, a perfect setting and story for Bresson's signature touches. Those looking for a swashbuckling Arthurian epic will be disappointed; those looking for a rigorous but rewarding investigation of conscience, fate, and tradition will be deeply rewarded.
The film begins with the information that "The Grail has not been found" and ends with a single word and image that implode a whole universe of myth.

Rating:
Summary: A Magnificent Study of Honor
Review: The story of Lancelot is one of loyalty, and who better to agonizingly dissect such a concept than Robert Bresson? His film is an investigation of the conceits of "unifying poetic myth," and none of the values allegedly transmitted through shared tradition emerge without the taint of flawed humanity. As always, Bresson darkens and reduces: Arthur is an anti-figure, Camelot is stark and roughhewn (though it is never dwelt upon, his vision of the round table, and the chairs around the table, are to my mind as stunning a bit of set design as you will ever find), nowhere does magic or myth pervade the storyline. The camera moves with guilty severity, Guenivere is near comatose, a voice of (t?)reason frozen in rigid profile. There is no "spectacle" (the famous jousting sequence is consciously anti-spectacular, but still a riveting use of camera and sound), the sumptuous beauty of the film comes from Bresson's compositions of human figures, stark lighting, and muddy green-brown colors. Lancelot du Lac is a magnificent, beautiful movie, a perfect setting and story for Bresson's signature touches. Those looking for a swashbuckling Arthurian epic will be disappointed; those looking for a rigorous but rewarding investigation of conscience, fate, and tradition will be deeply rewarded.
The film begins with the information that "The Grail has not been found" and ends with a single word and image that implode a whole universe of myth.

Rating:
Summary: Truth As Hero
Review: 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.