I had been persuaded by a friend to go watch “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” in the cinemas. I thought it would be a nice thing for me to do. I’m not that happy about paying full price for a cinema ticket because I know how much things used to cost in the 90s, but I’m pretty glad I watched the movie.
This movie was one of those “long lost” movies, and there’s been at least as much drama in the production of the movie as there has been in the movie itself, but I want to talk about the movie instead. I seldom go down to the cinema to watch movies these days, and I used to quixotically collect DVDs at home and keep them in my tiny room until they cramped my living space and I didn’t know what to do with them, and it’s only when I got myself a storage unit and stored some of my stuff there, that I actually looked into those boxes and started binge watching.
My first impressions of the movie were that this may have been about Don Quixote, but it was also about two other different plots as well. One of them was of a director going back to a movie that he had directed a long time ago as a student, and reliving his youth. Another one of them was about the process of creating a movie, of all the stakeholders involved, and all the politics that came with the territory.
Personally the movie spoke to me in a few ways that were unexpectedly profound. I thought it was notable that the movie was about a guy who was looking back at his youth and wondering how his directing career had panned out, and how he had given some of his old crew a start in a life of art. That was a parallel to a year back when I started reminiscing about my old experiences with high school drama productions.
I also had the chance to reminisce about my young adulthood, a lot of which was spent watching movies in a cinema. About a trip to Spain in my early 20s. About looking back at a youth that was maybe more passionate than your life today and you know that looking forward, you may not ever see that again. About how there was not only something truly quixotic about directing a film, but also something quixotic about the life that I was living in the present, taking leave of a life that I was leading, and suddenly deciding to go live in a different country.
I thought about the crazy adventures of the director protagonist, Grisoni, carrying the Don Quixote around, both as a reminder of his crazy youth and his crazier present, and also as a form of inspiration for the movie that he was currently trying to direct. The deluded Don Quixote in a way has a very ambiguous relationship with Grisoni. To us, Grisoni was the director of the original Don Quixote, and in spite of his youth, the more senior of the two. But the Don Quixote kept on referring to Grisoni as Sancho Panza and treating him like the squire, even though it was the squire who was keeping him out of trouble and saving him on many occasions. I suppose in a way that reflects the curious relationship between a director and his muse – who’s really the leader and who’s the follower?
Upon his return to Spain, there were the people who were in his old crew, and probably that’s why he mattered to others. But I think of my earlier life, and it did struck me that I really wasn’t giving much thought to making a large impact on somebody else’s life back then. It was an addled existence, in books, in blogs, in movies and in music, living in my mind, and believing that it was an existence that was profoundly meaningful. Perhaps it was, but when you’re daydreaming, your daydreams are ephemeral and they’re all apt to go back in a puff of smoke. I could remember some of the titles of movies that I had watched 20 years ago, but I could no longer remember what they were all about.
I suppose having memories of the past is somewhat related to a raving madman living a parallel fantasy. There were recurring characters, and as they appeared in different circumstances, they played roles that were similar to each other. There was a parallelism between a pirated DVD seller and the recurring menace that appeared sporadically. There were the two women, one of them a “boss’s wife” who kept on throwing herself at him, probably she represented the way that the movie industry prostituted art, or she represented some more immediate, hedonistic form of gratification. The girl who was acting in the earlier film – Angelina – is more of a love interest, and represents something deeper and more personal, like somebody who actually has access to some of your earliest memories.
I have to say that the depictions of Muslims in this movie are more than a little problematic. Sure, Islam has a history in southern Spain and today they are the refugees who cross the Mediterranean but depicting them as refugees / terrorists / bearded ladies can be a little too much. Although there are nods to the days of the Inquisition when they were pitted against hostile Christians. There was something about how the fantasy sequences imagined in a hallucination by “the director” and retold by the fake Don Quixote were almost exactly alike, but I’m not sure I grasped the point.
The finale in the great castle was in a way a merger of the two universes, the director stuck with Don Quixote in his crazy adventures, and also people in his present professional life. They were all in a way putting up some kind of a crazy act for Don Quixote and there was an air of palace intrigue about the surroundings. The way that Angelina turned out to be some kind of a courtesan was lamented by her father. Angelina in a way was a symbol of lost innocence, and also in a way a betrayal of the passion and fire of youth to the political machinations of the movie production machine. So there was a bit of edge to how he was going to save Don Quixote and Angelina by riding them out of the castle.
There is a curious re-alignment between Angelina, Grisoni and the fake Don Quixote. Don Quixote in a way died, or in a way he did not die, since he was the fake Don Quixote. And suddenly it fell upon Grisoni to be another fake Don Quixote and take up the mantle of the dreamer, while Angelina had to play the Sancho Panza instead.
I suppose perhaps what really sparked off this current bout of introspection in my own personal life is that this movie was about some ghost of a past co-existing with the present. This is about three old friends reuniting, and having another adventure that’s parallel to the one they had 10 years ago. Somehow, I thought about my younger self and my older self bumping into each other and sizing each other up, judging each other. (Disclosure: 20 years ago, I had written a play about an older man coming across a younger version of himself at a crucial juncture in his life, so this is not a new thought to me.) To me it seems that they are both ghosts which haunt each other ever and ever.
And there’s another angle to this: this was a film that had an extremely troubled genesis, and which was only completed 17 years after the initial production begun. And it also happens to be about a film director trying to cover back the same ground that he did when he was a film student. I wonder if there’s anything deeper than that. This is a frustrating film that has quite a few loose ends and you never know whether they’re really going to be developed.
I’m not sure how the angle of Americans versus Spaniards versus Russians played into this, somehow it seems that the Americans descended upon Spain to make a film, and yet the owner of the castle, the master of the studio / castle / citadel is a Russian (probably represents some kind of plutocracy) and it’s the Russian who ultimately colonises the American?
Last of all, there’s something a little funny about fake Don Quixote being played by Jonathan Pryce, who was the straight man protagonist in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”. Now it’s Kylo Ren playing the straight man and Jonathan Pryce playing the crazy demented fool in this movie, more than 30 years later.
Music Composition 