Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain.
Spain
- For Banco Sabadell it never rains but it pours. On top of the TSB IT debacle, the bank now ranks high on the list of banks exposed to dicey Italian bonds. According to Don Quijones, it has the equivalent of almost 40% of its entire fixed asset portfolio, worth €26.3 billion, and 110% of its tier-1 capital invested in these. Which is not a good thing, apparently.
Life in Spain
- Last week there was an horrendous explosion in the Galician town of Tui, down near the border with Portugal. It killed 3 or 4 people and destroyed 40 houses. The cause was fireworks illegally stored in a residential area by a man who'd had his factory closed down and who'd disobeyed court instructions with impunity. Contrast this with the fate of people who insult the police, the 'authorities', the monarchy or the Catholic faithful. These will be relentlessly pursued and even jailed. Which says something about modern Spain under the PP government.
The EU
- After Italy’s president last night rejected the appointment of a eurosceptic as Economy Minister, the country was plunged into a political crisis, with the leader of one of the coalition parties going so far as to call for the impeachment of the head of state. Which must all be a tad worrying for EU technocrats in Brussels. Of course, Italians are well used to 'political crises', so are probably less concerned.
- Here's Don Quijones on the banks – Italian and other - which are exposed to Italy's sovereign bond debt risk.
The UK
- In the last few years, carrots have become massively popular in the UK. And possibly elsewhere. This is because, predictably, people have twigged that – when you use a check-out machine – a 'carrot' weighs less than, say, an avocado. Allegedly, this is now so common people have forgotten it's a crime. Progress.
Galicia/Pontevedra
- The Pontevedra municipal government says it plans to restrict the speed of cyclists in the (so-called) pedestrian areas to 5kph. Let's hope so. And let's hope they apply the law to kids on buggies and adults on those 2-wheeled vertical things. They'd do well to also do something about cyclists, etc. on pavements outside the pedestrian areas. But this might be expecting too much of them.
- If you're coming to Galicia, you might want to take advantage of Renfe's Trens Turísticos (Trenes Turísticos in Spanish). In a brochure that fell out of a newspaper yesterday, I noted there are 12 of these, centering – inter alia - on monasteries, gardens, river valleys, thermal springs, lamprey-eating and, of course, vineyards. Impressively, the English version of the descriptions has clearly been done by someone who can actually speak the language well. Which is never a given in local brochures.
Finally . . .
- I told a German friend that the Liverpool goalkeeper, Karius, had been labelled French in one Spanish newspaper. He replied that the hapless chap had his German nationality withdrawn after his disastrous performance in the Champions League final against Real Madrid on Saturday night.
- To general astonishment, Gareth Bale revealed the extent of his poor relationship with team manager Zidane by confirming that the latter hadn't spoken to him after the match, never mind congratulate him on his 2 goals.
- I've mentioned more than once Terry Gilliam's ill-fated plans for a Don Quijote film. Well, it finally made it to the screen in Cannes last month but wasn't greeted with universal acclaim. Below are 3 reviews. Two are negative and only one positive, from The Guardian. I am with the writer of this one on his final comment: What a dull place the world would be without Terry Gilliam. I certainly plan to see the film. And am determined to enjoy it!
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
After countless false starts and dead ends, Terry Gilliam brings his magnum opus to screen — and it's a loud, belligerent, barely coherent mess. Peter Debruge
Delusions of grandeur, old-fashioned ideals of romance and justice, the eternal clash between cynicism and dreams — these are the themes of not just comic hero Don Quixote but also the career of director Terry Gilliam, for whom a film about the ostentatious knight-errant seemed like the perfect match of artist to material, to the extent that he devoted a quarter century of his life to getting “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” made. After setbacks more epic than anything described in the novel itself, Gilliam’s magnum opus exists at last, and the sad truth is, the reality can never live up to the version that has existed in his (and our) imagination for so long. If anything, it’s what the director’s fans most feared: a lumbering, confused, and cacophonous mess.
Opening with a wink — “And now … after more than 25 years in the making … and unmaking” — the film starts off on a promising foot. It teases us with Don Quixote’s most recognizable feat, jousting at windmills he has mistaken for giants, before revealing that we are in fact on the set of a TV spot for some Russian vodka brand (or maybe it’s insurance — the film is frustratingly unclear or downright inconsistent on many points). Once an ambitious young filmmaker, commercial hack Toby (Adam Driver) has effectively sold out, not only artistically but in his personal values as well — as when the director, asked by his boss (Stellan Skarsgård) to keep an eye on his beautiful young trophy wife (Olga Kurylenko), instead proceeds to seduce her.
Amid juggling the distractions of his comfortable yet meaningless existence, Toby is reminded of a black-and-white student film he made nine years earlier, also inspired by Cervantes’ classic novel, which sends him delving into long-forgotten memories of the humble shoemaker (Jonathan Pryce) he cast as Don Quixote and the 15-year-old village girl (Joana Ribeiro) with whom he innocently flirted at the time. Weirdly enough, until stumbling across a bootleg copy of the film, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Toby that there exists a connection between his present project and this earlier one, shot just a stone’s throw from his current gig. As the details come flooding back, he feels compelled to follow up with these two actors.
Just outside the small Spanish town, Toby stumbles on the old cobbler, who — as revealed via flashback — has spent the intervening years believing that he is indeed Don Quixote. This being a Terry Gilliam movie, there’s a good chance that he’s right, or at least has some valuable perspective to impart upon the skeptical Toby, whom he mistakes for his “loyal squirrel” Sancho Panza. After all, in Gilliam’s two most acclaimed films, “12 Monkeys” and “The Fisher King,” the director blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, toying with the idea that perhaps only lunatics see the world for what it truly is. In those earlier projects, part of the fun came in trying to guess just how much had been a hallucination, whereas here, it’s all one big jumble.
What does the man who thinks he’s Don Quixote want? And what service does Toby provide by going along with the charade — which he does in some scenes while strenuously objecting in others? When a filmmaker has as many years as Gilliam did to think about a project, one expects all that time for reflection to help in clarifying what he intended to say all along. Plainly, there are elements of autobiography at play (like Toby’s character, Gilliam must have revisited the people and places who participated in the version maudit chronicled in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s fascinating what-might-have-been documentary “Lost in La Mancha”). But it’s terribly unclear whether Gilliam identifies with either of his protagonists — the jaded young director grappling with the emptiness of his career or the foolish old coot uniquely capable of recognizing adventure in a world stripped of magic. Each is unpleasant to be around in his own way, while an ill-fit romance with either or both Ribeiro’s and Kurylenko’s characters feels grafted on and incoherent.
Beneath a grizzled beard and beak-like prosthetic nose, Pryce makes a fine-looking Don Quixote (a role for which Gilliam worked with many actors, including Jean Rochefort and John Hurt, both acknowledged in the end credits), but his sonorous voice starts to sound like a braying donkey, given the over-loud levels at which the film is mixed. Combine that with Driver’s antic performance as the exhaustingly incredulous Toby (which sorely lacks the quixotic comic touch that Johnny Depp would have brought), and the whole experience feels like a recipe for a migraine.
It doesn’t help that Driver’s dialogue requires him to drop more F-bombs than a David Mamet character, dooming the whole slapsticky enterprise — which clanks and honks with the sort of off-kilter energy only children seem to appreciate — to an inevitable R rating (early on, Toby even insists on using the F-word in his TV commercial … as if it’s totally normal for expletives to find their way into advertising campaigns). If only such an easy fix might transform this misbegotten project into something commercial, although Gilliam remains his own worst enemy, insisting on artistic freedom while lacking in many of the fundamental skills expected of a director (from basic screenwriting to getting consistent, relatable performances from gifted actors) to sustain our interest once things start to go off the rails, which they do about 20 minutes in, around when Don Quixote murders two Spanish police officers he mistakes for “enchanters” — a word you will never want to hear again, so long as you live.
To Gilliam’s credit, no one creates characters as spectacularly unhinged as he does, giving us over the course of his career such larger-than-life nutjobs as Baron Munchausen and Hunter S. Thompson — although they so often wear out their welcome. In theory, Don Quixote should be a welcome addition to the stable, but what wouldn’t we give for an interpretation of the crazy crusader who treated his quests as something more than the silly ravings of a colorful eccentric? Early in the film, one of Toby’s cohorts warns that “we become what we hold on to” — a line that may as well be an open admission on Gilliam’s behalf of a certain kinship he feels with the character, although the result feels like evidence of someone who spent too long obsessing over Don Quixote, eventually losing sight of whatever attracted him in the first place.
Film review: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote at the Cannes Film Festival
If there were a Palme d’Or for persistence, then Terry Gilliam would walk it. When he started work on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 1991, George Bush Sr was president and Adam Driver, his eventual lead, was seven. In 2002 the former Python’s cursed efforts to complete the film even inspired what may be a first, a making-of documentary, Lost in La Mancha, about a film that was never made. It showed an increasingly haunted Gilliam beset by fighter jets screaming overhead, his original Quixote falling ill and the set being washed away by a thunderstorm. “It’s going to be an extraordinary film,” the director said at one point, trying to convince himself as much as his cast.
“It’s going to be beautiful and terrible at the same time.”
It pains me to write this, but he’s been proved right. Yes, he’s done what eluded Orson Welles and brought Cervantes’ tale of mock heroism to the screen, reviving the production and settling a lawsuit from a former associate before the film could be shown at Cannes (there’s a disclaimer at the start of the film and a message saying: “And now, after more than 25 years in the making, and unmaking . . .”). Yes, the result is ambitious, sometimes clever and often beautiful. Yet it’s often as empty as the parched Spanish landscapes in which it takes place. It didn’t once make me laugh or cry. Not that those things are always essential, but they’re to be hoped for with a tale with as much potential pathos and comedy as this. Cannes, sadly, hasn’t ended with the climactic triumph that everyone was hoping for.
The film is certainly multilayered. There are four Don Quixotes: the actor who plays the deluded knight in a commercial; Toby, the quixotic American director of the commercial (Driver, in the role that Johnny Depp took in the abandoned production); Jonathan Pryce, taking over from Jean Rochefort (who died last year), as the Spanish shoemaker who starred in an amateur film of Don Quixote directed by Toby when he was a student and who now believes he really is Quixote; and Gilliam himself, tilting at the windmills of his vainglorious imagination.
Clear as mud? Welcome to Gilliam world! Like A Cock and Bull Story, Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of Tristram Shandy, this is a tricksy telling of a tricksy book. The difference is that Winterbottom’s film was properly funny. Gilliam too often resorts to ’Allo ’Allo!-style language gags as the Spanish locals confuse “squire” and “squirrel”, “telephone” and “elephant”. Failing that, he gets Driver to fall over a lot and say “f***”.
Driver is otherwise rather good as the enfant-terrible director, as is Pryce, dementedly chivalrous with rusty armour, straggly beard and Denis Healey eyebrows. There’s a bonkers postmodern plot involving a Russian vodka baron, Stellan Skarsgard as Toby’s boss and Joana Ribeiro as the Spanish girl who appeared in Toby’s student film and had her head filled with dreams of stardom. Toby somehow ends up as Pryce’s Sancho Panza, absurd astride a mule while his “master” surges ahead on his charger.
Seeing someone with their nose in the book of Don Quixote, Pryce asks, astonished, “Have you read it?”, a nice gag about the small proportion of people who have actually made it through Cervantes’ weighty tome. There are also plenty of in-jokes about the production’s troubled gestation. When a rainstorm strikes, one of the ad-shoot team cries: “This is the one month of the year when they say it never rains!” Gilliam’s self-reflexive story fits the novel’s themes of reality v fantasy, madness v sanity and, perhaps most pertinently, the vain dreams of old men.
Yet all this narrative sleight-of-hand means you don’t end up caring a great deal about any of the characters. Nor is the film particularly mindblowing visually. We get a vivid Semana Santa celebration and some fun CGI giants, but not quite the grandiose flair of Brazil and 12 Monkeys.
Gilliam has described the project as the story of a man’s “last hurrah, one last chance to make the world as interesting as he dreams it to be”. Let’s hope that’s not the case with Gilliam and, with this itch finally scratched, he can make more of the inspired films of which he’s capable. Because the problem with this one, strangely for such a labour of love, is that it’s missing a bit of soul.
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote review – Terry Gilliam's epic journey finds a joyous end: Peter Bradshaw Guardian
After a three-decade production ordeal Gilliam has delivered a sun-baked fable of money, madness and the movie business – and done so with trademark infectious charm
Terry Gilliam has brought to Cannes his long-gestated and epically delayed movie version of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a biblical ordeal of wrecked sets, collapsed funding and bad luck that has outlived two of the actors once cast – John Hurt and Jean Rochefort – and which has been attended by colossal legal acrimony and brinkmanship right up to the red-carpet steps themselves, as the former backer Paulo Branco sought to injunct its showing here as closing gala. A French court found against Branco last week, but its screening here has been prefaced by a solemn lawyerly announcement respecting Mr Branco’s future claims. It’s a backstory of enormous drama, well told in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s documentary Lost in La Mancha, all the way back in 2002, when it looked as if Gilliam’s Quixote film, like Orson Welles’, would never be made.
Well, hooray for Gilliam’s energy and self-belief because now it has gotten made, co-scripted with Tony Grisoni, and although it doesn’t have the visually ambitious and even revolutionary style of Brazil and 12 Monkeys – nor the hard edge of my own favourite of his later films, Tideland from 2006 – it is a film of sweet gaiety and cheerful good nature, an interesting undertow of poignancy, and with a lovely leading turn from Jonathan Pryce as the chivalric legend himself and roistering action scenes pleasantly like Richard Lester’s Three Musketeers movies from the 1970s. It’s almost like a children’s movie, in fact – and there’s nothing wrong with that.
This is a film with a sentimental respect for its source material – but Gilliam has new and vigorous insights to offer. It’s as if he is politely waving away our obvious view that he is a Quixote figure tilting indefatigably at movie-business windmills. No, the key player here is Sancho Panza: the servant, the enabler, the rational sceptic whose detachment is faltering, the sorcerer’s apprentice who doesn’t realise that he is being inducted into a mysterious art of creative self-delusion.
As befits Cervantes’ daringly postmodern novel, in whose latter part Quixote is aware of being a famous figure because of to the publication of the first part, Gilliam’s Quixote is multilayered. Adam Driver plays Toby, the arrogant and overpaid ad director who has been given the chance to make a feature and has opted for Don Quixote. We see him filming in Spain, shooting the giants/windmills scene and enduring those same nightmares of delay that famously tried Gilliam’s faith and have become mythic expressions of imagination and reality. The movie is being bankrolled by an obnoxious, racist businessman, played by Stellan Skarsgård, whose jaded wife, Jacqui (Olga Kurylenko), tries to seduce Toby. Skarsgård’s mogul is in hock to a sinister Russian oligarch, Alexei (Jordi Mollà), who has a huge castle and is given to throwing fancy-dress parties and staging various dramatic events.
But in the midst of his ennui and cynicism, Toby is suddenly galvanised: he chances upon a bootleg DVD of his first film: a lo-fi, black-and-white indie that was an adaptation of … Don Quixote. He remembers his passion and idealism, and how he used local non-professionals to make it. His star was a kindly old shoemaker, played by Jonathan Pryce. While shooting is on suspension, Toby journeys to the nearby village to discover what has happened to his old star, and is astonished to discover that the experience of that film completely unhinged the man – or rather it gave him an energy and passion that he never had before. He now believes that he is Don Quixote, striding around looking for worlds to conquer and wrongs to right, his overwhelming vocational energy carrying him along. The bewildered Toby, overstressed and not used to the blazing heat, starts to become his Sancho Panza, losing his grip on boring old reality.
It’s a nice premise – similar, perhaps, to Dennis Hopper’s 1971 cult film The Last Movie, about a film-shoot in Peru creating a new kind of ritualistic culture. Pryce has exactly the right daft pomposity and wide-eyed credulity, believing in his own publicity, his own mythology. Driver creates a pretty straightforward character, aggressive, sweary and without much in the way of nuance. As he starts to lose it, his arrogant Americanness starts to curdle and he begins to fantasise that Moroccan illegals are jihadi terrorists, and hallucinates a visit from the Spanish Inquisition (surely Gilliam was tempted to add a line on whether they were expected), antisemitic bigots whose prejudice affords Toby an insight into his own heatstruck paranoia. Joana Ribeiro is interesting as Angelica, herself ruined by being cast as a teenager in Toby’s movie, and who endured 10 long years of disillusionment in showbusiness before returning to her home town, where the poor shoemaker now thinks that she is his Dulcinea.
It may not be Gilliam’s masterpiece, but it is a movie with sprightliness, innocence and charm and it is a morale boost to anyone who cares about creativity that Gilliam has got the film made at all. His own intelligence and joy in his work shine out of every frame, and his individuality is a delight when so much of mainstream cinema seems to have been created by algorithm. What a dull place the world would be without Terry Gilliam.
After a three-decade production ordeal Gilliam has delivered a sun-baked fable of money, madness and the movie business – and done so with trademark infectious charm
Terry Gilliam has brought to Cannes his long-gestated and epically delayed movie version of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a biblical ordeal of wrecked sets, collapsed funding and bad luck that has outlived two of the actors once cast – John Hurt and Jean Rochefort – and which has been attended by colossal legal acrimony and brinkmanship right up to the red-carpet steps themselves, as the former backer Paulo Branco sought to injunct its showing here as closing gala. A French court found against Branco last week, but its screening here has been prefaced by a solemn lawyerly announcement respecting Mr Branco’s future claims. It’s a backstory of enormous drama, well told in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s documentary Lost in La Mancha, all the way back in 2002, when it looked as if Gilliam’s Quixote film, like Orson Welles’, would never be made.
Well, hooray for Gilliam’s energy and self-belief because now it has gotten made, co-scripted with Tony Grisoni, and although it doesn’t have the visually ambitious and even revolutionary style of Brazil and 12 Monkeys – nor the hard edge of my own favourite of his later films, Tideland from 2006 – it is a film of sweet gaiety and cheerful good nature, an interesting undertow of poignancy, and with a lovely leading turn from Jonathan Pryce as the chivalric legend himself and roistering action scenes pleasantly like Richard Lester’s Three Musketeers movies from the 1970s. It’s almost like a children’s movie, in fact – and there’s nothing wrong with that.
This is a film with a sentimental respect for its source material – but Gilliam has new and vigorous insights to offer. It’s as if he is politely waving away our obvious view that he is a Quixote figure tilting indefatigably at movie-business windmills. No, the key player here is Sancho Panza: the servant, the enabler, the rational sceptic whose detachment is faltering, the sorcerer’s apprentice who doesn’t realise that he is being inducted into a mysterious art of creative self-delusion.
As befits Cervantes’ daringly postmodern novel, in whose latter part Quixote is aware of being a famous figure because of to the publication of the first part, Gilliam’s Quixote is multilayered. Adam Driver plays Toby, the arrogant and overpaid ad director who has been given the chance to make a feature and has opted for Don Quixote. We see him filming in Spain, shooting the giants/windmills scene and enduring those same nightmares of delay that famously tried Gilliam’s faith and have become mythic expressions of imagination and reality. The movie is being bankrolled by an obnoxious, racist businessman, played by Stellan Skarsgård, whose jaded wife, Jacqui (Olga Kurylenko), tries to seduce Toby. Skarsgård’s mogul is in hock to a sinister Russian oligarch, Alexei (Jordi Mollà), who has a huge castle and is given to throwing fancy-dress parties and staging various dramatic events.
But in the midst of his ennui and cynicism, Toby is suddenly galvanised: he chances upon a bootleg DVD of his first film: a lo-fi, black-and-white indie that was an adaptation of … Don Quixote. He remembers his passion and idealism, and how he used local non-professionals to make it. His star was a kindly old shoemaker, played by Jonathan Pryce. While shooting is on suspension, Toby journeys to the nearby village to discover what has happened to his old star, and is astonished to discover that the experience of that film completely unhinged the man – or rather it gave him an energy and passion that he never had before. He now believes that he is Don Quixote, striding around looking for worlds to conquer and wrongs to right, his overwhelming vocational energy carrying him along. The bewildered Toby, overstressed and not used to the blazing heat, starts to become his Sancho Panza, losing his grip on boring old reality.
It’s a nice premise – similar, perhaps, to Dennis Hopper’s 1971 cult film The Last Movie, about a film-shoot in Peru creating a new kind of ritualistic culture. Pryce has exactly the right daft pomposity and wide-eyed credulity, believing in his own publicity, his own mythology. Driver creates a pretty straightforward character, aggressive, sweary and without much in the way of nuance. As he starts to lose it, his arrogant Americanness starts to curdle and he begins to fantasise that Moroccan illegals are jihadi terrorists, and hallucinates a visit from the Spanish Inquisition (surely Gilliam was tempted to add a line on whether they were expected), antisemitic bigots whose prejudice affords Toby an insight into his own heatstruck paranoia. Joana Ribeiro is interesting as Angelica, herself ruined by being cast as a teenager in Toby’s movie, and who endured 10 long years of disillusionment in showbusiness before returning to her home town, where the poor shoemaker now thinks that she is his Dulcinea.
It may not be Gilliam’s masterpiece, but it is a movie with sprightliness, innocence and charm and it is a morale boost to anyone who cares about creativity that Gilliam has got the film made at all. His own intelligence and joy in his work shine out of every frame, and his individuality is a delight when so much of mainstream cinema seems to have been created by algorithm. What a dull place the world would be without Terry Gilliam.
© David Colin Davies, Pontevedra: 28.5.18
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