The Poetry of Violence: Lancelot du lac

[The following essay contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]

Lancelot du lac both begins and ends with scenes of shockingly graphic violence. Two knights clad in cumbersome suits of armor clash on a desolate battlefield, so thoroughly exhausted that they can barely lift their weapons. Finally, one combatant lands a decisive blow, beheading his opponent with one last desperate flail of his sword; the decapitated corpse collapses in a limp heap, gushing blood onto the parched, trampled soil. Riderless horses gallop through eerily quiet woods in a blind panic, passing dismounted soldiers kneeling over splintered lances. Errant arrows whistle through the air and embed themselves in tree trunks, the narrow shafts vibrating briefly before shuddering to a terrible, deafeningly silent stillness.

This is Arthurian legend as only Robert Bresson could—or would—depict it, the director of Pickpocket bringing his signature minimalist style to material that would ordinarily be the subject of a sprawling, spectacular, elaborately staged period epic. Unlike, for example, Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, there are no tall, handsome, valiant heroes or sneering, sinister villains here—only old, weary men confronting their inherent hypocrisies as their irrelevance becomes increasingly apparent. This bleak, borderline apocalyptic tone is reinforced by the conspicuous absence of any explicitly fantastical elements from the plot: there is no Holy Grail to be found, no miraculous boat to whisk the wounded king away to the shores of Avalon, no Merlin or God, no salvation or redemption. Nor are there honorable causes, divine decrees, or Holy quests to pursue; the characters are instead motivated to maim and slaughter and kill by petty quarrels and personal grudges.

The world that these versions of Lancelot, Guinevere, Arthur, Gawain, and Mordred inhabit is as cruel and senseless and mundane as our own reality—making the oppressively tragic atmosphere that pervades the film feel all the more intimate, universal, and tangible.