Since this is an old story, nourished by chivalrous rites and liturgies, Christian and pagan, let us be allowed to repeat an antiphon: what sadness, for the film by David Lowery (A Ghost Story, The Lovers of Texas) and for its audience, which we cannot see The Green Knight in the dark, in front of a big screen. This contemporary reading (more than an adaptation) of a little-known work of Arthurian gesture is, from start to finish, a sensory enchantment, a series of terrifying, sensual or absurd moments that play on reality and the distance between the past and the present. To give it its true dimension, it will therefore be necessary to carry out the enlargement of the image and the gesture yourself.
The gesture around which the film revolves is atrocious: beheading. Yet it is a game, the victim herself assures us. At the court of King Arthur (Sean Harris), between Christmas and New Year’s Day, a big banquet is given to which Gawain (Dev Patel), who, here, is not yet a knight, arrives late after one night. spent in the company of a prostitute, Essel (Alicia Vikander), whom he loves and who loves him. The party is interrupted by the irruption of a monstrous creature, a gigantic knight mounted on a steed as green as its master. He therefore offers a game to Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It will be necessary to strike a blow to the Green Knight and whoever succeeds must, a year and a day later, appear before his victim in a distant chapel and receive the same blow there. Gawain, still squire, takes up this insane challenge which made the knights retreat. He beheads the giant, who gets up and goes, his head in his hands.
When winter returned, Gawain set off for the chapel, despite Essel’s objurgations (“This is how fools perish, isn’t it enough for you to be good? “, she asks him). The stations along his path take on the physiognomy of a small band of bandits, a beheaded saint, a stately couple (Joel Edgerton and Alicia Vikander, again) and a talkative fox. All these elements are found in Sire Gauvain and the Green Knight, handwritten poem by an anonymous 14th century English poete century. David Lowery has rearranged them so that they find their place in a XXI imaginatione century without losing their deep mystery.
Sense of the absurd
Dev Patel, who stars as Gawain, recently performed on David Copperfield by Armando Iannucci, a character driven by a question: “Will I be the hero of my own life?” “ In the knightly universe, the answer is obvious. Except that Lowery injects into his script, into his imagery, a sense of the absurd which gradually undermines the very idea of heroism. The eternally youthful face of Dev Patel, the empathy and compassion he arouses through his astonishment, wonder and fits of weakness, are the antipodes of heroic posture.
You have 31.64% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.