The Green Knight’s ethereal, enigmatic and erotic seductions
Dev Patel’s new movie is as strangely seductive as it is hallucinogenic.
Tales of Arthurian knights have endured for a millennium because there is something so compelling about those derring-do heroes and their quests.
Bound by a notion of honour that makes no sense in contemporary times, Arthurian legends are a tease of a different world, a world that may never have existed except in the imaginations of all those who took delight in the stories.
American director David Lowery (Old Man & the Gun, A Ghost Story) took one of the best-known tales, of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and adapted into an ethereal, enigmatic and sometimes erotic film, The Green Knight.
Starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander and Joel Edgerton, The Green Knight is visually astonishing, packed with majestic frames in which its artful cinematography and soul-penetrating score combines to transport you into an indefinable space.
Even when The Green Knight feels opaque and out of grasp, it’s always engaging – challenging you, provoking you to travel with Gawain as he journeys to what is most likely his death.
Unlike the Sir Gawain of Arthurian legend, this version of the character (Patel) is not a knight. A layabout who drinks all night, his mother Morgan le Fay (Sarita Choudhury) calls on the mystical Green Knight.
The creature presents himself at Arthur’s (Sean Harris) Christmas feast with the offer of a game – land a strike against him and in one year’s time, that person must travel to the Green Chapel to receive the same.
Rather impetuously, Gawain steps up to the challenge. With Excalibur in hand, he beheads the Green Knight. But his triumph is short-lived as the Green Knight picks his head up off the ground and bids them farewell, with the promise to see Gawain in a year.
Gawain’s feat rings through the land and he is feted in every tavern and drinking hole.
When the year passes all too quickly, he knows he must meet his fate and he sets off towards the Green Chapel, on a quest in which he meets scavengers, virgin ghosts, a magical fox, giants and an alluring Lady (Vikander).
All the while, the spectre of inevitability hangs over him.
Lowery is a filmmaker who is interested in death and legacy, and those preoccupations are threaded through what is ultimately a coming-of-age movie about a young man who needs to find peace with himself.
For all of The Green Knight’s strange seductions, there’s a very relatable core at the heart of it.
It’s a film that will enthral and fascinate audiences who won’t be able to push it – and certain images – out of their heads, still trying to decipher the meaning of every moment, convinced of one theory only to change their minds a day later.
Which means it’s not the most accessible film but those who are open to its idiosyncrasies may well find themselves converted.
Rating: 4/5
The Green Knight is on Amazon Prime Video from Friday, October 29
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