LOVED IT 5/5
Highbrow review with spoilers:
This is not a movie or trying to be one. It’s a tone poem composed in film. It’s an arthouse thinkpiece. In the moment we are inhabiting, most people come to medieval subject matter expecting action and saga (hi there, Game of Thrones). This is not a narrative about a physical quest, it’s an inner imagination of going on a quest. The story of the film is superficially framed as a medieval romance. That comes from the original Gawain poem. The film actually takes place in a dream world where Gawain fantasizes, primarily about himself. There’s a lot of navel gazing here. Time is stretchy, interactions seem random and are either long or fleeting depending on what has the most meaning to Gawain and his inner monologue. When his inner narrative lingers over the things he is and the things he aspires to be the film is painfully slow. Nothing happens as he turns over these details and savors them one by one. He repeats to himself that he’s a nobody and not a knight, Arthur can’t even properly pronounce his name, yet Arthur singles him out and asks him to sit at his side in the place of honor, and he’s not even related to Arthur (what could that possibly mean?) then he allows himself to become Arthur. That is the beginning scene. As everyone who has tried to watch this knows, it’s the first several minutes and it’s excruciatingly slow. It’s self-indulgent directing and smells really arty-farty because the director hasn’t really won your attention yet. It’s a bad artistic call that makes people give up and tune out. (I actually fell asleep and had to get caffeine and stick it out to the scene where Gawain finally sets out with all his new shiny gear.) Gawain is every noob in Fortnite. Within five minutes of putting his character in play, some random kid from a field and two girls strip him of all his gear and weapons before he can even get off a shot, and hogtie him. Dev Patel was just fantastic in this part of the film - I personally lived his cringey shame while he was helpless and squirming like a worm. It’s Gawain’s nature to do things on impulse and then replay with slight variations to taste different realities and emotional outcomes, so he fantasizes that he never leaves this spot, he dies alone tied up in the woods, and decomposes in place. Then he shifts back to his reality. At Winifred’s cabin he plays with both the deserted and inhabited possibilities in the same scene. While it’s deserted the bed is empty so he sleeps in it. In the alternate reality Winifred is alive and chasing him out. In the deserted cabin she’s a skull at the bottom of a spring to be matched with a skeleton in a burial arrangement on a not-empty bed. In the alternate universe she becomes his wife. I agree this film is arty. It’s arty in the literal sense to the point of being an in-joke: I see several scenes which are staged paintings from various European eras. Dev Patel’s elongated face and large eyes are Byzantine iconography come to life, the melancholy saint painted on a wood triptych. The king and queen literally wear gilded haloes lifted from Dark Ages religious art. Saint Winifred is a plump Renaissance woman with delicate hair and ethereal dress. The wife has opulent clothing in rich tones and pearl earrings, like a woman in a Vermeer. She uses camera obscura and methods that won’t be developed for several centuries to mechanically capture a portrait of Gawain, at a time when all images of people are drawn or painted by hand. I have big love for the stylized visual composition of this film. It uses a duotone color palette of dull yellow and muddy blue to saturate the tones of the clothing and in some cases stain the sky. It looks trippy and postmodern to you and me but nicely also reflects an ancient world with a limited number of textiles and dyes. You’re supposed to be challenged by this film. You’re either going to love that or hate it.