GREEN KNIGHT MOVIE
One of his angles on this story is the power, the danger, of stories in themselves - as the movie makes clear early on. It is a strange film from the start, riddled with the sparks that have animated Lowery’s work from the beginning of his career.
Rarely has it been revisited as disarmingly, nor as movingly, as in Lowery’s The Green Knight. So begins this unusual journey, one oft referenced and retold in the centuries since the appearance of the poem, whose author remains unknown. It all seems to happen so fast, the Green Knight’s laughter echoing with a tone of, See you next year. What - this easy? So much for returning the axe … Only, in the next moment, the mysterious man stands up, grabs his head - eyes atwinkle - and gallops away, cackling like a villain. The Green Knight’s head is summarily lopped off. The Green Knight sets down his arms and takes a knee in front of Gawain, his head low, as if to make an offering of his neck. And so The Green Knight proceeds with the first of its many startling, titillating, unreal scenes. But Gawain - not a boy, yet not a knight with any tales worth telling - volunteers, eager to make something of himself. No reasonable person, no proven hero with nothing to prove, would take him up on such a deal. The Green Knight creaks and crackles with the cumbersome heft of an animate tree trunk, yet is somehow light, witty in intention if not in tone, and all the more terrifying for the lively spark in his eyes - the devious tell of a born trickster. At which point, he will return the blow - the same blow - in kind. Take the Green Knight’s giant axe, deal him a fearsome blow, and in a year and a day’s time, meet him on his own grounds, at the Green Chapel - he will not give directions you’ll have to journey into the wilds to find him - to return his axe. A beheading game, as it’s known: a hero-making ordeal that is also, deliciously, a guarantor of death or something close to it.
Hence the slick curiosity of the game that the Green Knight has come to these decorated halls - full, in theory, of worthy men - to play. The Sir Gawain at the start of this film, as of the poem, is no such figure. Heroes and villains - figures of note - get titles. Lopping the titular hero off the title, letting the villain of this quest loom as the sole bearer of the movie’s name, is one hint of that, though like so much of what Lowery does with his source material, it largely heightens an idea that the poem had already asserted. And he has come to play a game.ĭavid Lowery’s new film, The Green Knight, is an adaptation of the wonderful 14th-century chivalric poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, only, in the nature of many of the best adaptations, it revises the material freely, leaning into a revisionism that amounts to a daring act of interpretation. Despite all of this, he has ostensibly come in peace. The Green Knight looks the way a swamp smells, verdant but suffocating - only heavier, more rigid.
GREEN KNIGHT SKIN
A man with skin seemingly rent of wizened tree bark and a rich baritone of a voice (that of Ralph Ineson) that would seem fit for symphony halls but for the fact that it vibrates with some unaccountable, earthen quality, a rumbling from the bowels of the unknown. The Green Knight: villain, fantasy, brute. It’s a Christmas feast like any other, for the knights of the round table, but for an unexpected guest. It is Christmas, and King Arthur (Sean Harris) is in his court, his queen Guinevere (Kate Dickie) to one side, and to the other, his nephew Gawain ( Dev Patel) - who, just that morning, woke up in a brothel who has not yet done any great deeds who feels inadequate in such esteemed company as King Arthur’s court, with its storied, noble celebrants, all of them legends in the flesh, with stories to tell.
0 kommentar(er)
