Film directors Ozu and Pasolini are palpable influences on this quirky contemporary reflection on Cervantes’s celebrated novel Don Quixote. Director Albert Serra eschews habitual formulas for historical dramas in providing a far more austere reflection on how a text from the distant past might be re-envisaged for present day audiences. As such, the film provides a commentary on a novel that has fascinated and arguably defied filmmakers as diverse as Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam. This is a minimalist tale of routines and rituals, where the mundane and the mystical go hand in hand. Lluis Serrat’s Sancho Panza is no quickwitted sidekick but a rather placid, shy servant and a man of few words. Lluis Carbo’s Quixote is a surrogate father of sorts, an impatient old man whose adventures are now few. Shot entirely on location, with a resourceful camera that is as much a distant observer of the action as an involved participant, this is a film on the poetics of the ordinary, that imagines Cervantes’s eponymous duo through the prisms of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.—Maria Delgado.

Director: Albert Serra

Spain| 2006. Subtitled. Colour. Dolby Digital Stereo. 110 min

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