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Rating:
The movie that is, without ever having existed.
There are true myths that are fueled over the years, legends that the media system emphasizes and turns into a CULT often unintentionally, like Federico Fellini's never-realized film (I Viaggi di G.Mastorna) or this “Don Quixote” by Orson Welles.
This film, started back in 1955 and almost completed at the end of the '60s; over 15 years of filming, interruptions, changes of scenarios, locations, film stock (ranging from 16 to 35 mm), and even protagonists for a never-ending film that the famous director never saw edited.
Welles said that to call it truly finished, he would have had to film the explosion of the Atomic Bomb that would destroy everything except the two protagonists. Perhaps an alibi or an artful romanticized excuse (typical of the director) to avoid the question that was continuously being asked from all sides: “When will you finish filming Don Quixote?”
Only in 1992 did Welles' widow, Oja Kodar, entrust the filmed material to the talent and care of another director, a Spaniard named Jesus Franco, specialized in horror and thriller cinema.
A film therefore edited posthumously and without precise directives, as Welles left no editing instructions, since the screenplay was continually improvised and changed several times over 15 years. An artistic operation thus with quite a few perplexities but which, in fact, is the only way we have to see in semi-definitive form a film that otherwise would never have been born.
Born almost as a joke (as Welles himself admitted), it started from a screenplay commissioned for a series of documentaries for Italian RAI but gradually took possession of the author until it became his splendid obsession.
A poor film born in a haphazard manner, therefore, with improvised sets and unpaid actors, shot with makeshift means and in more or less adverse situations, entirely financed by Welles himself who saw funding refusals both from American Majors and European producers.
Irregular, at times unresolved I would say, but with truly enviable visual power, featuring underlying iconography that seems to echo Gustave Doré's images in the original printed edition of Cervantes. This film speaks to us of the diaphanous utopian leader and his faithful squire Sancho Panza, placing the unfortunate heroic deeds in a contemporary Spain (from the mid-'50s to the '60s), thus transforming a production minus (the otherwise exorbitant costs of a scenographic reconstruction ad hoc) into a great creative opportunity: narrating the deeds of a Don Quixote who lives here with us in the present, among motorcycles, bullfights, TVs, space missiles, and other “modern monsters” far more fearsome than windmills.
A lively and irreverent Don Quixote, who becomes an icon of his own deeds (the documentary-like scenes of people on balconies who recognize Don Quixote in astonishment, pompously on horseback, passing past squares that even bear his likeness on the walls, are beautiful).
A film I would define as a missed masterpiece for the numerous dead times and too many scenes connected without continuity or with frankly repetitive dialogue on the verge of boredom (I still highly recommend watching it in Spanish with Italian subtitles!) and yet a film that gives us back the unrestrained love of the director for Spain and for Latin peoples in general.
Welles' “Don Quixote” is a half-successful work, diligently edited in its most likely hypothesis but who knows what it might have become if only the genius American director could have handled it in the way and style that only he knew how to craft. But as we know, the road of what ifs is endless yet always has very little road to travel and always finds the time it finds...
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