EL SENYOR HA FET EN MI MERAVELLES

Albert Serra
In disbelief, we follow the making of a film that does not exist, together with the director and his crew, who travel across La Mancha on the real sites of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The film is an extension and a metafiction of Honor de cavallería, starring the same duo of actors, this time walking around hotel rooms and roadsides. At first, it was meant as a filmed letter to Argentinian filmmaker Lisandro Alonso, commissioned by CCCB in Barcelona for an exhibition inviting directors to start “Correspondences”. A stationary road movie, a fake film about cinema, or maybe a twisted remake of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), this Lord is above all the portrait of its characters-actors, especially Toti (aka Jordi Pau), an eccentric figure of the hippie golden age in Ibiza, who carries the whole film with his strokes of genius and his maddening moods. Based on incredibly beautiful sequence shots, enhanced by a radicalised treatment of reverse shots, this strange object could well be one of Albert Serra’s best films, also one of his most pleasing and mysterious. Like all his other projects, only more frontally, it stands at the exact crossroads of the anecdotal and the mythical, of boredom and overexcitement, and it tells us on the sly the true history of Spain in between two naps on the edge of the abyss. (L.C.)