The best knight film for decades: David Lowery’s wonderful fantasy epic “The Green Knight”.
When was the last time we saw a really good knight film? No monumental action film like Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven” or a masculine show of strength like Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart” (both of which, of course, have their place). But a finely woven, medieval tapestry that takes legends for what they are: fairy tales that want to be taken seriously.
“The Green Knight” is probably the best knight fantasy since the 1980s, since Rob Reiner’s “The Prince’s Bride” and John Boorman’s “Excalibur”. Director and writer David Lowery, who forged this rare piece of jewelry, was a toddler.
Becoming known with the unusually sensitive Disney remake “Elliot the Dragon” and the minimalist ghost film “A Ghost Story”, he spins his most personal film to date from the Arthurian legend. His enchanted story twines around them like a light climbing plant around a mighty oak. Its most important source is the anonymous epic “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” from the late 14th century.
Dev Patel plays this Gawain, a nephew of King Arthur, as a sensual bon vivant. Before he goes to Camelot Castle on Christmas Eve, his mother, a witch played by Sarita Choudhury, secretly thinks up an exam for him. After all, nobody knows whether he is brave or even knightly enough to deserve a place at the famous Round Table.
This test is proclaimed by an eerie rider, more of a tree than a person in his knightly armor: whoever of those present has the guts to do so, may strike him on the spot with a sword. But the offer comes with a price tag: if he survived it, he would receive his opponent in his green chapel on Christmas Eve – to give him the same blow back.
Gawain is the only one present to respond to the apparently unproblematic test of courage. In fact, it is more of an intelligence test: the head can be separated effortlessly from the body of the plant man, but the man takes him under his arm again with a laugh. And leaves behind a dazed young man who only has a year to prepare for the loss of his own head.
Already in these first scenes Lowery succeeds in balancing otherwise contrary elements: a raw, almost documentary-looking depiction of medieval life, painterly composed tableaus and a few but effective digital animations. It is connected by an often atonal film music, composed by Daniel Hart with a lot of percussion and Carl Orff choirs.
The surreal totality only comes to its full effect in the middle part of the film – the tragic hero’s odyssey through enchanted forests, to a witch’s house and into the castle of a supposed patron.
Lowery also lets him pass the battlefield, which is obligatory in most medieval epics – but not for a spectacular crowd scene: littered with corpses, the morbid place warns the fearful hero of the consequences of the knightly power he longs for.
The real trick for this not exactly straightforward story of initiation of a man who simply cannot merge with his own ideal is its simplicity. What a wonderful irritation arises, for example, from a simple double occupation: We meet the beguiling Alicia Vikander first in a brothel, then as a courtly seductress. Or there is a camera tour in a forest where Gawain was attacked by robbers: first she records the victim as a skeleton, then turns it again in the other direction, and he is alive again. But what’s the difference? One of Gawain’s acquaintances along the way is Saint Winifred. He asks her, “Are you really?” And Winifred replies, “What’s the difference? I need my head. “
What is really stunning, however, is the change in direction of the film shortly before its end. The solemn, ballad-like epic is now reinventing itself as a wordless, 15-minute-long finale. Before he became a director of feature films, David Lowery worked as an editor for a long time, and he also edited this virtuoso piece himself. Seldom has one seen so much playfulness in a big feature film, so much unorthodox and such a natural surrealism.
At the very beginning, the royal couple presses the likeable young man in vain: “We want to hear your story.” An understandable wish in a time full of legends. But Gawain has not yet experienced anything. Lowery does not simply stage what he experiences afterwards as events. It shows it as freshly as a story that is just being thought up. All sorts of things for a knight film based on the ancient epic by an anonymous author.
The Green Knight. USA, Irland 2020. Regie: David Lowery. 130 Min.
