The Making of Quixote

[cclark]

A review from BestMovie.it: http://www.bestmovie.it/news/cannes-2018...ne/638178/

Google translation:

Cannes 2018: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote di Terry Gilliam. La recensione

Uno dei film più attesi e rimandati della storia del cinema, è alla fine arrivato sul grande schermo. Jonathan Pryce è il cavaliere errante della Mancia e Adam Driver Sancio Panza. O forse no…

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote è stato presentato fuori concorso al Festival di Cannes 2018

HISTORY

Toby (Adam Driver) is a young American director who is making a film about Don Quixote. Important budget, a crew that treats him like a king and a producer who considers him a genius. In the same areas, a few years earlier, he had made his graduation work with a few dollars, a short black and white opera called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. In the part of the protagonist an amateur, a shoemaker met by chance (Jonathan Pryce). The same shoemaker who, meanwhile, will discover, has convinced himself that he is indeed the errant knight of La Mancha and will involve him in spite of himself in a series of picaresque adventures, in which to distinguish between fantasy and reality will become more and more complicated.

CRITICAL

The impression that you have seen The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (but basically it was already true for The Zero Theorem) is that the cinema of Terry Gilliam has definitely lost any connection with his time, so much so that the production controversies that have accompanied him in Cannes they seem almost a side effect of its extraneousness to the film economy, even the festival one.
Magical realism, fantasy of rags and papier-mâché, characters all over the top, incredible and incongruous revelations.

It's like entering a kind of secondhand carnival, or in a village theater with squatting boards: the stage machine survives itself because behind the scenes there's an old master and good actors who blindly believe him, in practice they also believe in it for the public. There may be understandable perplexities for such a thing, and many will be disappointed by certain naivete (here in Cannes about twenty journalists gave up halfway through the projection), but if there is a story that perfectly supports the weight of a cinema like this free and ramshackle - in fact, almost pretends - that is Don Quixote della Mancha. Because it is very clear that for Gilliam's visions the necessary money is no longer around, and it is equally clear that his poetics still justifies an act of fantasy and one of loyalty.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in this way wonderfully sews the vision of the author to that of the protagonist, and that of the public to that of Sancho, becoming just the testamentary film that could be supposed. The damn movie, postponed for twenty years and now held hostage by a producer. The film shot and turned (there is also an inside joke on the infamous flood that put an end to the first attempt, in 1998), written and then rethought, passed through the death of two designated protagonists (Jean Rochefort and John Hurt, to whom dedicated) and the fate of a director who gradually lost all his credentials and who even risked missing this festival for a last-minute illness.

Here: for those who will remain until the end, watching the last, wonderful five minutes - where suddenly the digital explodes, where the special effects invade the screen like fireworks, where we see what the film could have been with other industrial ambitions and another portfolio - the feeling of a collected heritage, actors and spectators together, is really strong.