“Bresson has used the background and characters of Arthurian legend as the basis for an original story, systematically eliminating all the fantastic elements.... This is a distinctly modern Lancelot: the central focus is on the adulterous affair between Lancelot and Guinevere, seen within the wider context of the unsuccessful Grail quest and the dissolution of Arthur's kingdom. The absence of any psychology...and the degree to which Bresson isolates (characters) from their environments and defines them in relation to each other, all serve to give them unmistakable contemporary reverberations” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Sight & Sound).
Bresson's soundtrack is a modern symphony of noises, carefully edited into an abstract expansion on the images. Long stretches of the film are without dialogue, and offscreen dialogue is taken to an extreme; those moments in which a person is heard but not seen are the aural counterpart of a visual scheme in which hands, knees and legs are seemingly disembodied from their armored owners. Exaggerated noises are at times ironic comments--the clash of armor, for instance, that precedes lovemaking--but the powerful effect of Bresson's elliptical soundtrack, as of his images, is that of a code of honor broken down, and of “poor Lancelot, trying to stand firm in a shrunken world.”