My Friend has been nagging me to sit down and watch this film about Don Quixote with him for weeks and weeks, and I was skeptical. I don’t have a really good bead on his taste, beyond original, standalone sci-fi and action films. He doesn’t like art house pictures or indie movies about quirky teens most of the time, so I assumed that he was trying to watch this one to prep for one of his classes. This is probably the last time that I’ll underestimate his ability to sniff out the perfect weekday movie.
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is a dream, a pet project of many years from the mind of Monty Python’s own Terry Gilliam, and starring the world’s most gangly Adam Driver alongside “that guy who was the bad guy in that Bond movie” aka Jonathan Pryce (apparently he’s also in GoT, but I have no idea). The female leads Olga Kurylenko and Joana Ribeiro are electric and dynamic, emotional whipsaws and excellent facsimiles of sexy sheep (at one point). Without giving too much, or any of the plot, I can just say that my image of the film without ever having seen the trailer and barely having seen a poster for this film (which has apparently been living in production purgatory for months if not years?), was that of the image above, a simple retelling of the Don Quixote story with maybe some big name actors to draw an audience. Within the first two minutes of the movie, that expectation was turned on its head and that head was split open, as if by a windmill.
At the one hour mark, Friend’s colleague asked how much more time there was for the movie and we checked and both of us were speechless. What had felt like the first two thirds of the film had barely registered as the first act–“What more could happen?” I cried. “How many more places could they go?” he screamed. “They’ve already been taken in by secret Muslims,” I shouted, at which point his colleague told us to quiet down or we’d wake the baby. We weren’t lamenting how slow the movie’s pacing was. I think we just couldn’t picture in which direction it could be gaining momentum.
We sometimes describe this element of plot unknowability as “tumbly,” as in “I like how the storyline tumbled along,” as opposed to one that sits within the tight confines of a genre film. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is fully in control of its free-fall, and I’m sure that if I were to give it a second viewing that it would seem a lot more organized than it felt on first watch.
The elements of magical realism and unreliable narration were well-crafted and alternately humorous and disquieting. Adam Driver’s triumph was finding a dozen different ways of using the phrase “holy fucking shit.” Pryce speechifies trippingly in his grandiloquent screenplay patois and his final scene is gripping cinema.
Whenever this film makes it to your theater/festival/streaming site of choice, give it a look see. It’s more than it first appears.
