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It opens where Polanski's Macbeth closes, arterial squirts in a gutted kingdom. Arthur (Vladimir Antolek-Oresek) locks up the empty Round Table, "too many dead, too many memories," the Grail is nowhere to be found. Lancelot (Luc Simon) returns from the quest for transcendence and is promptly reminded of the flesh, the affair with Guinevere (Laura Duke Condominas) is a fiercer temptation than ever. Gawain (Humbert Balsan) is a faithful observer, Mordred (Patrick Bernhard) a scheming lurker. "I crave the impossible," everyone's tale, Robert Bresson above all in his astoundingly stringent medieval cantata. How far back does the curdling of spirituality go? Has chivalry faded, or was it always just another name for the violence of men? The forest is an emerald realm streaked with slender trunks, decomposing skeletons now dangle from trees. "Poor Lancelot, trying to stand his ground in a shrinking world." Myth distilled, pageantry slashed. Jousting tournament in a sandy arena, a magnificent cubist montage: Charging figures reflected in the muted gasp of an audience, flags hoisted up a pole to the throb of bagpipes, a ruthless rubato of competitive destructiveness that ends with the victor staggering away to bleed on the ground. The human condition wears a suit of armor, heavy and clanking, the metallic skin that contrasts with the Degas nudity of Guinevere's bath. (The one most upfront about earthly desire, the Queen is also the one most clear-eyed about holy crusades: "It was God you wanted. God is no trophy to bear home.") Witnessing it all are the alarmed equine eye and the disembodied whinny, tender beasts caught in the shower of human arrows. The ethereal and the grisly build towards one of Bresson's grandest images, the heap of slaughtered knights in the woods like Nature unbalanced by bloody robots. Rohmer rearranges the material in a lab (Perceval) and Boorman takes it to the opera (Excalibur). Cinematography by Pasqualino De Santis. With Arthur De Montalembert, Charles Balsan, Christian Schlumberger, Joseph-Patrick Le Quidre, and Jean-Paul Leperlier.
--- Fernando F. Croce |