London Film Festival pick of the day: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is well worth the wait

David Sexton4 September 2018

The BFI London Film Festival programme is made up of strands — groups of films built around themes to help festivalgoers navigate their way through the less familiar titles.

The Laugh strand contains humour of varying shades, including The Bill Murray Stories; Crystal Swan, about a young Belarussian woman’s bungled attempts to escape to the west, and Florianopolis Dream, about a Brazilian family holiday on a gorgeous beach — what could go wrong?

And then there’s Gilliam. To say Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the Laugh Gala Screening, is a film with a history is like saying Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays. The former Python first set out on the road to La Mancha when he began shooting a version starring French actor Jean Rochefort. The money ran out; the production shut down; Rochefort died.

A decade later came a kind of not-the-making-of documentary, Lost in La Mancha, about the failed attempt. Now, trailing controversy and the occasional lawsuit, comes the definitive film that almost never was: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, with Adam Driver as Sancho Panza and Jonathan Pryce as Quixote, in which Gilliam charts the modern-day making of a film, with side trips into that previous attempt to shoot it and an excursion into the age of Cervantes, the Spanish classic’s original author.

Passion project: Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

Twinned across the ages, the picaresque Cervantes and the irrepressible Gilliam tilt at windmills with all the enthusiasm and distinctive humour for which both are renowned, recreating worlds with the same attention to detail as all Gilliam’s films. A treat.

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