Lancelot Du Lac (1974)

2 out of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Utter boredom

A Customer from OXON, 21st August, 2008

Lordy what a tedious film. Wooden acting and appalling editing make this film an 'avoid at all costs.' They only had one sound effect, a very loud horse. This is used randomly thoughout the film. The same clip of mounted knights galloping through a forest is used about 20 times and for some reason, the same 5-6 notes from a bagpipe is used in one scene about 300 times. Very poor effort from France cinema. Avoid like the Black Death that is this very sickly film.

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2 out of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Not the Holy grail

A Customer from Bath, 17th August, 2008

The film takes up the Arthur theme where Monty Python left off: the first scene is very reminiscent of the loony knight sketch. However it son goes downhill from there it seems that medieval Brittany was populated by gloomy existentialists who spend all their time clanking around in armour and brooding moodily like sulky Gallic teenagers (as in other Bresson films nobody laughs or cracks a joke throughout the entire film). I can't understand how this ever won an award, i just couldn't get over Lancelot's lilac tights.

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1 out of 1 people found the following review helpful:

UNINTENTIONALLY HILARIOUS !

WBarklam from from London, 16th October, 2008

I couldn't agree more with two of these reviewers - this is completely Pythonesque film especially with all that blood gushing out of the helmets ! What really got on my nerves was the chainmail clanking on the soundtrack whenever the actors moved around - admittedly historically accurate, but a case when attention to detail goes too far, even though I was probably spared some of the stilted dialogue obscured by the sound of armour flailing about ! Not really a Bresson fan - the only one I've really enjoyed is 'Pickpocket' - also his 40s films ( which to most Bressonites is not typical Bresson - spare me from typical Bresson, I say ! )

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Typical Bresson

Savage from from London, England, 4th September, 2008

Robert Bresson is one of the very few directors in the history of cinema never to have made a bad film. This is one of his supreme masterpieces, a disquieting meditation on the end of the Knights of the Round Table, as Lancelot, the only returning knight to have been granted a (brief) vision of the Grail, tries to live up to this glimpsed ideal. He also knows that it was his adulterous affair with the Queen which has ultimately riven the King's hopes, and he soon finds that he is alone in searching for heavenly riches. Everyone else - Guinevere and Mordred especially - are quite happy if they get what they want here on Earth. Bresson's characteristic non-professional cast are even more inexpressive than usual, a deliberate device, accentuated by the hilariously clanking armour they all wear, demonstrating how hidebound are their attitudes, leading to the final image (echoing the bloodshed and horror of the pre-credits sequence), of a pile of dead and dying knights, anonymously forgotten in the forest. It's a bleak film, and, like Bresson's others, a kind of religious epiphany. It's not for those in search of excitement or thrills, unconventional in its style and unfashionable in its concerns. But it's also a devastating disquisition on mortal ambition and a genuinely compelling piece of cinema.

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