Two by Bresson: ‘Lancelot of the Lake’ & ‘A Gentle Woman’
Originally published in Cinemania on February 20, 2025.
Stories are never equal to reality, and legends are the furthest from it of all stories. The legend of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and their quest to find the Holy Grail (collectively referred to as the Matter of Britain) is one of history’s most appealing and enduring stories. Alas, storytellers embrace its heroism, its romance, its magic — because it’s a tale that invites an audience’s imagination and admiration.
Per usual, in Lancelot of the Lake (1974), Robert Bresson, anarchist against fancy and glorification, demystifies the legend — stripping it of its magic, literally and figuratively; and making it “ugly” (the images themselves are gorgeous as ever), the horrors of knighthood and love’s destructiveness (and, in the background, a King’s unstoppable, materially religious search) shown from an unblinking eye — and, per usual, his intuition unearths a poetic dual counterpoint to general beautification and a film audience’s inclination for escapist unreality (superfluous bright-red blood gushing from knights’ lopped-off and bashed-in heads is admittedly ironic and exciting to see of Bresson). For those who appreciate his approach, the film is a near-perfect, quintessentially Bressonian iteration of the Arthurian legend of the Knights of the Round Table.
Bresson’s 1969 film A Gentle Woman is a similarly “cold” appeal of the clichés of then-modern cinema, but much more directly combative. As with Mouchette (1967), which preceded it, Bresson explores women’s oppression — mostly by men, but also by social class — and their rebellion against it (that the protagonists in both films kill themselves to free themselves screams of Bresson’s sympathy for their predicaments). It’s certainly not an uncommon topic for its time and place (or art in general), but as usual, his approach is uniquely beholden to realism, and as such the film commands serious considerations: what is a women’s place if not beside a man; what agency does a woman have, socially, to live freely and apart from marriage; is early post-collegiate marriage the most practical means for financial stability? Late-1960s France was a decade into the Fifth Republic and still rebuilding its post-WWII power (the film is adapted from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story A Gentle Creature, written during a period of great unrest under Tsar Alexander II’s rule which led to the Russo-Turkish War), and the titular Elle (model Dominique Sanda) is an embodiment of the progressive social discourse.
A Gentle Woman doesn’t bother with sugar or sympathy; there’s too much for Bresson to say, and he’s a ruthlessly efficient storyteller. He intended for the film to be a challenge and resented populist art movements that strayed from stern subtext or dolled themselves until unrecognizable parodies of real life. Melodramas, opposite to A Gentle Woman, are easy to watch flippantly, and thus few (if any) are able to challenge us like it does.