HONOR DE CAVALLERÍA

Albert Serra
Lost in the countryside, locked outside or at the margins of Cervantes’ famous book, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza remember, often silently, their past and future adventures. This film about a chivalrous friendship combines the slow pace of events with the frenzy of the shots and editing, so as to stay closer to the duo of actors, Lluís Carbó (a perfect Quixote) and Lluís Serrat (his famous squire). Albert Serra met them in his native village of Banyoles, where they worked as a tennis instructor and a builder; both of them were to play in all his films. Shot in a few days on a rudimentary digital camera and then transferred to film, Honor de cavallería became an instant classic. This grainy, absurdist and melancholic micro-saga undoes, or rather “unwrites” more than it adapts this masterpiece of modern literature. The text is an excuse to kick off a new form of cinema: at once minimalist and ambitious, poor and overgenerous, it works selflessly to produce slight touches of grandiose, and, looking vaguely like a stroll in a forest, it rivals the great portrait paintings, with the Spanish Golden Age in its line of sight and line of fire. (L.C)