Movie of Sorrowful Countenance

So Terry Gilliam finally released his famously doomed film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2019). Conceived in the 80s (if I remember correctly, I’m not looking it up again), he shot a little in the early 2000s with Johnny Depp, got flooded out, lost funding, and got a famous documentary out of it. Now, it comes to life, starring Adam Driver (who, Ms. Spenser says, is in everything now).

He plays a director filming a Don Quixote themed commercial in Spain. It isn’t going well. His boss, Stellar Skateboard, has found a DVD of his student film about Don Quixote, and hopes it will inspire him. His boss’s wife, Olga Kurlyenko, seduces him, but he is more interested in watching the DVD.

The next day, he realizes that the village he filmed it in is nearby, and heads off. In flashback, we see him and his college buddies partying in the little town and enlisting the locals to be in the film. He picks an old cobbler to be the knight (Jonathan Pryce), and the 15-year-old daughter (Joana Ribeiro) of the tavern keeper as Dulcinea.

In the village, he finds people indifferent or hostile. Ribeiro has run off to the city to be a whore, as her father says. And Pryce is now a madman who believes he truly is Don Quixote, being kept by an old woman as a tourist attraction. He decides Driver is Sancho Panza, and they escape to find adventures (accidentally setting the town on fire as they leave - and maybe killing a policeman or two).

Their first adventure involves a windmill, and Pryce is wounded. A group of seeming Gypsies in a ruin take them in, but Driver comes to suspect that they are terrorists. As things spiral out of control, he wakes up, and it was a dream - the people are just undocumented immigrants.

From here on, things continue to spiral. Ribeiro shows up for the commercial shoot as part of a Russian oligarchs retinue. She has been a wannabe actress and “escort” and is sort of owned by the Russian, but doesn’t accept Driver’s apology. She has the life she wanted, sort of. The boss wants to find out who is doing his wife. There is a mysterious gypsy. There are wild costume parties, and Pryce acting crazy. And it ends in madness.

I liked this movie a lot, especially the way it wove madness and reality together, while always escalating. But recently Gilliam has been bad-mouthing Black Panther as an unrealistic portrayal of Africa, and I’m mad at him (along with everyone else on the internet). So I don’t know what to think. I guess I’ll watch Lost in La Mancha and get over it.