The film is of course a pure creation and it is built on three layers, all of them fictitious, more or less, but always a little or a lot according to what you know or think of Cervantes and Don Quixote. First Cervantes, then Alonso Quijano and finally Don Quixote. The first one is the author. The second one is the real identity of the character. The third one is his imaginary identity in his knight errant fantasy and delusion.
The film centers on Cervantes, a playwright and actor who performs in the market place. His plays are satirical and hence attack directly or indirectly the all-powerful church in Spain. It is true Cervantes was excommunicated by the inquisition, but here he is arrested, imprisoned in an underground dungeon and finally summoned for his trial and we will never know the end of it, though we know he was not executed, far from it.
Then the film puts him on trial in the vast dungeon where he is imprisoned by the people in the dungeon, under the authority of the one who was appointed governor of this underground society by the inhabitants of this netherland. To defend himself he gets the right to perform his Don Quixote story, whose manuscript got nearly burnt. He uses his props and masks and all the people in the dungeon take part. It is thus a description of the life in such a prison and of a play that is acted in good faith and with fun by the prisoners as an entertainment. Think or dream of an entertainment in such a miserable environment where you do not see the light of day and where anyone can be summoned for trial, which means questioning (I guess this is a nice word for torturing) and then sentencing and executing.
If the play is performed in the prison, the camera takes us in real outside décor and setting and we get the Don Quixote story in the real imaginary world of Cervantes. And we get everything, the giant windmills, the horse Rocinante, the whore Dulcinea, and many other niceties of that kind draped in some fantasy or delusion by Don Quixote. That world is cruel, cruel with women first of all, cruel with people who are not "normal" then, those who seem to be slightly "crazy" or "corrugated" if not plainly "deranged suckers." Violence is the basic condiment of this life and for women it is rape, which is not rape really in those days, just using the woman the way she is supposed to exist for. Willing or not is not a question in those days and love is nothing but sex at the request of the man and no is not a possible answer from the woman. Like it or not, that's your function. The film is not fuzzy about it.
And yet that makes Don Quixote really crazy who lives in a world of chivalry that has been long gone in the sixteenth century, a world of chivalric and courteous love that has never really existed, except as a dream in the minds of some medieval poets, a world of honor, glory and enchanters, hence of some kind of magic that has never had the slightest beginning of an existence or reality.
But we evade these two worlds into the real world of the fictional character Alonso Quijano who is dying. He is on his death bed totally unaware of his fantastic adventures when his servant Sancho and the inn maid from the local inn come to visit him and try to revive his delusion to lead him to a pleasurable death. And little by little his memory comes back and he dies singing the song about reaching the unreachable star, as if dying was the surest way to do so, but it sure is a pleasant way to die for Don Quixote, or is it Alonso Quijano?
The last and fascinating aspect of the film I want to mention is the music and the songs. They are absolutely mesmerizing and they are worth a fortune of pleasure. We can understand why Jacques Brel recorded the score in its French adaptation. There is no difference between, that Don Quixote and so many of the characters in Jacques Brel's songs, Jacky, Jef and innumerable other Caporal Casse Pompon. It is a true testament about real true voracious life fantasized by a truly insane person who believes a world that was a dream in the Middle Ages is possible in today's global village. The film here works on that dimension so well that there is no hope of any salvation in this universe, nor in any other post mortem cosmos except dying singing about a dreamlike Never- never-land with a Captain Hook and a Tinkerbell in the childish mind of Peter Pan. "I could pretend I'm flying away."
Well done but not quite for younger children.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
The film centers on Cervantes, a playwright and actor who performs in the market place. His plays are satirical and hence attack directly or indirectly the all-powerful church in Spain. It is true Cervantes was excommunicated by the inquisition, but here he is arrested, imprisoned in an underground dungeon and finally summoned for his trial and we will never know the end of it, though we know he was not executed, far from it.
Then the film puts him on trial in the vast dungeon where he is imprisoned by the people in the dungeon, under the authority of the one who was appointed governor of this underground society by the inhabitants of this netherland. To defend himself he gets the right to perform his Don Quixote story, whose manuscript got nearly burnt. He uses his props and masks and all the people in the dungeon take part. It is thus a description of the life in such a prison and of a play that is acted in good faith and with fun by the prisoners as an entertainment. Think or dream of an entertainment in such a miserable environment where you do not see the light of day and where anyone can be summoned for trial, which means questioning (I guess this is a nice word for torturing) and then sentencing and executing.
If the play is performed in the prison, the camera takes us in real outside décor and setting and we get the Don Quixote story in the real imaginary world of Cervantes. And we get everything, the giant windmills, the horse Rocinante, the whore Dulcinea, and many other niceties of that kind draped in some fantasy or delusion by Don Quixote. That world is cruel, cruel with women first of all, cruel with people who are not "normal" then, those who seem to be slightly "crazy" or "corrugated" if not plainly "deranged suckers." Violence is the basic condiment of this life and for women it is rape, which is not rape really in those days, just using the woman the way she is supposed to exist for. Willing or not is not a question in those days and love is nothing but sex at the request of the man and no is not a possible answer from the woman. Like it or not, that's your function. The film is not fuzzy about it.
And yet that makes Don Quixote really crazy who lives in a world of chivalry that has been long gone in the sixteenth century, a world of chivalric and courteous love that has never really existed, except as a dream in the minds of some medieval poets, a world of honor, glory and enchanters, hence of some kind of magic that has never had the slightest beginning of an existence or reality.
But we evade these two worlds into the real world of the fictional character Alonso Quijano who is dying. He is on his death bed totally unaware of his fantastic adventures when his servant Sancho and the inn maid from the local inn come to visit him and try to revive his delusion to lead him to a pleasurable death. And little by little his memory comes back and he dies singing the song about reaching the unreachable star, as if dying was the surest way to do so, but it sure is a pleasant way to die for Don Quixote, or is it Alonso Quijano?
The last and fascinating aspect of the film I want to mention is the music and the songs. They are absolutely mesmerizing and they are worth a fortune of pleasure. We can understand why Jacques Brel recorded the score in its French adaptation. There is no difference between, that Don Quixote and so many of the characters in Jacques Brel's songs, Jacky, Jef and innumerable other Caporal Casse Pompon. It is a true testament about real true voracious life fantasized by a truly insane person who believes a world that was a dream in the Middle Ages is possible in today's global village. The film here works on that dimension so well that there is no hope of any salvation in this universe, nor in any other post mortem cosmos except dying singing about a dreamlike Never- never-land with a Captain Hook and a Tinkerbell in the childish mind of Peter Pan. "I could pretend I'm flying away."
Well done but not quite for younger children.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU