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starwarsnonsense · 6 years

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The Man Who Killed Don Quixote - London Film Festival Review

Seeing The Man Who Killed Don Quixote yesterday was, to put it mildly, a rather surreal experience. I’ve known Terry Gilliam since I was a little kid introduced to the delightful weirdness of Monty Python’s Flying Circus by her dad (Gilliam mostly concentrated on the animation for Python - a favourite ‘sketch’ of mine involves a people-eating pram), and after I saw Brazil at university I was hooked on his work as a director. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is a film of quasi-mythic proportions, with Gilliam first coming up with the idea for a Don Quixote film before I was even born. An aborted attempt to make it with Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort, became so plagued by bad luck that the entire project collapsed. Even the version of the film that Gilliam actually got made, now with Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce as his stars, continues to be cursed - this time, a legal challenge from a former producer has resulted in the movie failing to get distribution outside of a few European countries. I am one of the lucky ones in that I was able to see it at the London Film Festival.

(n.b. if you’re in the UK and missed it in London, there is a screening in Bath, Somerset on 10 November 2018.)

Now I’ve seen it with my own two eyes, I can say that The Man Who Killed Quixote (hereafter Quixote) is a quintessential Terry Gilliam film - it has the quirky humour, surreal images and blending of fantasy and reality you’d expect. It was messy as hell, but it was thoroughly entertaining. I saw 10 films at the London Film Festival, and while I saw several films that were better I enjoyed Quixote the most out of all of them.

I will be writing a full and detailed review of the film below, which will include spoilers. If you want to wait for an opportunity to see the film for yourself, I recommend skipping this review and waiting for your chance.

The film starts by introducing us to Adam Driver as Toby, who is directing an elaborate, Quixote-themed commercial. Driver excels as a cocky, egotistical womaniser - while he flits from woman to woman and frequently confuses their names, he nonetheless remains appealing and charming. At a dinner Toby is approached by a mysterious gypsy who offers him a bootleg DVD of a student film he made 10 years prior - seeing the film again causes Toby to become distracted and reminisce about his student days, and the creativity and passion for filmmaking that he has now lost. Upon returning to the village he used as the setting for his film, he finds he left shattered lives in his wake - Javier, the cobbler he cast as Quixote, is now convinced that he’s the old adventurer, and insists that Toby is actually his squire Sancho Panza. Another casualty of Toby’s student film was Angelica, the daughter of the local innkeeper, who Toby seduced with naive suggestions of a career in the movies - Angelica went to the city to pursue her dream, but found herself resorting to escort work when the stardom she’d aspired towards came to nothing.

Through a series of bizarre events too convoluted to properly describe, Toby has to team up with Javier/Quixote, and they make for a delightfully entertaining odd couple. While Javier/Quixote is steadfast in his identity as Don Quixote de la Mancha (Pryce is typically charming, although the role doesn’t call for him to do much beyond be obstinately cheerful and bull-headed with his persistence), Toby goes on an epic journey of development and self-reflection - through his encounters, he is forced to face up to the consequences of his actions. More importantly, however, he is forced to acknowledge the power and importance of fantasy and imagination. While Toby starts off ranting at Javier/Quixote, driven by panic and frustration as he demands that his companion break free of his delusion, he eventually recognises that there is something admirable in how Javier/Quixote lives. Javier/Quixote, as it turns out, possesses all the honour and integrity that Toby lost long ago. In this film, delusion isn’t depicted as a state to which you retreat to escape - it’s shown to be something emboldening that allows people to face things, achieve things, that would be unthinkable if they were entirely sane.

Take, for example, the relationship between Toby and Angelica. We first see them together as young people in flashback - their first meeting is framed in terms of her innocence and his youthful enthusiasm. They respond to those qualities in each other, and Toby carries the memory of an innocent and beatific Angelica in his mind right up until the moment when her father confronts him with the knowledge that Angelica has become a sex worker (a well-deserved criticism of this movie is that every single female character is either a crone, a whore or a pious virgin, with some characters skipping between categories as the plot demands).

When they reunite in the present, it’s in a magical environment - Toby has fallen into a cave filled with water, and he looks up to see Angelica bathing under a waterfall, framed to look ethereal and nymph-like. It’s very much a reunion that feeds into Toby’s idealised memories, going some way towards overcoming his knowledge of the state she has been reduced to. Later, he can no longer escape that reality - at an elaborate medieval-themed costume part held by Angelica’s vile lover and keeper, Alexei, Toby is forced to watch as Angelica is debased and humiliated, having to lick the remains of a canape from Alexei’s foot. It’s deeply upsetting - for the viewer as much for Toby.

This sight kickstarts a kind of psychological collapse in Toby - he goes from insulting Angelica, cruelly condemning her “choice” to remain a whore (in those insults, I sensed Toby’s need for Angelica’s situation to be her fault, rather than his), to being shocked from that spite and cynicism during his dance with her. Angelica slaps him for each insult, and at the culmination of the dance they kiss passionately and resolve to run away together. They are held back by Javier/Quixote’s refusal to insult their guests’ hospitality by leaving prematurely, and Angelica is caught and separated from Toby. Toby becomes frantic as he searches for Angelica, and starts chasing a woman wearing her red dress - only when he reaches the bedroom at the top of the tower does Toby realise the woman he was chasing was Jacqui, a former flame who wished to trick Toby into making love to her. Toby is further tormented as he looks down from the bedroom to see Angelica strapped down to a pyre being set alight - now Toby, like Javier before him, is losing sight of reality. Instead of the cynical director, he is now the knight on a quest to save his love. This culminates with the end of the film, where Toby does indeed become the next Quixote, with Angelica as his squire (this was handled in a quite delightful fashion, with Angelica’s kiss being met with a saucy comment on how the relationship between Quixote and Pancha is about to take an interesting turn). The film ends with Toby/Quixote and Angelica riding off into the sunset. It’s an ending that makes no sense as a rational resolution to their story, but it feels perfectly natural in the context of the chivalric fantasy that the film ends as.

To focus on this is to focus on but a single thread of the film, but it is probably the thread I found most interesting. Quixote is rather problematic in terms of its depictions (particularly of its female and minority characters), and you never forget that you are watching a film framed solidly around a man’s experience. The dreams and fantasies that Quixote concerns itself with are very much those of men - the desire to be a hero, the desire to be a saviour, and the desire to be covered in glory. What is most interesting about this film, then, is how it interrogates these fantasies and explores what is required to fulfil them (the answer, in my view, is at least some degree of madness).

The only clear message to emerge from this film is that Quixote himself is the truest model of nobility and courage - Toby only becomes more heroic as he edges closer to the qualities that characterise Quixote, but there is fascinating ambiguity in the ending. At the end, Toby himself seems lost, as Javier was lost before him, and almost every trace of the person he used to be has been wiped away. I think that, for Gilliam, this was perhaps the only way he could see of giving Toby a “happy” ending. The Toby who we see at the start of a film is a creature who existed on the surface of life, interested exclusively in making money and satisfying his sexual appetite. By the end, Toby is filled with earnest conviction and belief in the principles of chivalry - he bears almost no resemblance to the person he started out as (cheeky innuendo to Angelica aside), and the message to be taken from this is clearly deliberately elusive. Is Toby’s ending a victory for dreamers, with him saving his true love and riding off into the sunset? Or is it a statement on the impossibility of atoning for past mistakes in any realm besides the fantastic one? (For me, the jury is still out.)

The whole film is, in many ways, an allegory, and I think it might well be Gilliam’s testament as an artist. It’s not his most accomplished film and it’s lacking in several respects (particularly budgetary - you can tell this represents a compromised vision), but I can confidently say it’s one of his more interesting works and it’s quintessentially his. I think any person with artistic leanings could look at this film and see Toby and Quixote as the two different faces of creativity - Toby is the base reality that many creative people become reduced to, while Quixote is the pinnacle of shining sincerity and passion that many aspire to but few can attain. It’s a messy film with grand ambitions that it can’t quite live up to, but it’s absolutely fascinating and I sincerely hope I don’t need to wait another ten years to see it again.

(And to lower the tone for the end of this piece, Adam Driver is devastatingly attractive here - the kissing scenes are ridiculously sensual, and Adam rocks an off-the-shoulder cape like he was born to wear medieval high fashion. We also need more films where Adam is a romantic hero who rides about on horseback.)

#the man who killed don quixote #adam driver #terry gilliam #film #cinema #film review #london film festival #london film festival 2018 #jonathan pryce #joana ribero

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