In “The Green Knight” chivalry was always dead

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, the popular poem from the 14th century, begins during the Christmas season at King Arthur’s court when a huge man the color of spinach rides into the banquet room with a proposal. He will accept any blow from one of Arthur’s knights if that knight comes to his own house, the Green Chapel, in a year and a day and receives a blow in return. Arthur wants to accept the challenge, but his nephew Gawain intervenes. “I am the weakest, I know, and the weak in spirit,” he explains, “so my life would be the least loss.” who calmly lifts his head and rides away: See you in a year.

In the next winter, Gawain, richly armed, goes in search of the Green Chapel. Finally, half dead from cold and hunger, he reaches a castle – “It shimmered and shone through mighty oaks” – where a stately landlord and his beautiful wife shower him with comfort. The host also has a suggestion. During the day he will hunt while Gwalchmai rests; in the evening he will give Gawain the booty to hunt, and Gawain will give him everything he has won in the castle. The next morning the host’s wife sneaks into Gawain’s apartment. “You are welcome in my body,” she mumbles. He parries their advances but accepts their kiss and plants his own on the lord during the nightly exchange. This happens twice more; Finally, the lady also offers a magic belt that is supposed to make its wearer invincible. Gawain, thinking of his appointment with the downfall, keeps the present. The next day he goes to the chapel, where the Green Knight swings his ax and brushes Gawain’s neck. That’s for holding back the belt, the knight roars, revealing himself to be the host. “You like to be alive. I don’t blame you! “Gawain, torn by repentance, puts the belt over his shoulder -” a sign of my sinfulness “- and rides home as a wiser, true knight.

Only the broadest outlines of this obscure poem can be seen in “The Green Knight,” an enchanting (and even more obscure) new film from David Lowery (“A Ghost Story,” “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”). One obvious departure is the dissolution of Gawain’s character – I think this is the most apt term. In the text we meet our hero in full form, already the flower of chivalry. “As much as pearls exceed peas in value, / so Gawain compares himself to other noble knights”, explains one character. He is chaste, but has the manners of a perfect court lover. In contrast, the movie’s gawain, played with laid-back, charming incorrigibility by Dev Patel, is untested, unknown, and a bit of a bargain. He refuses to turn his lover Essel into an honest woman, and he shows neither the martial strength nor the verbal eloquence of the original figure. (“You are not very good at questions,” teases the host.) When robbers intercept him on his way to the Green Chapel, Gawain doubts whether he is a knight at all.

It’s a question that would seem ridiculous in the poem. The original character feels determined by his social role, which is shaped in every quality and gesture by the values ​​of the warrior elite. Lowerys Gawain is looking for a more individual code, if he is looking for a code at all. “Honor,” he says uncertainly to the host, “is part of the life I want. “

A Gawain who has not fully settled into chivalry – who seems to be sovereign at the beginning of an ambiguous educational novel – is an unrecognizable Gawain, and the reverberations of his apostasy change history. Much of the original drama emerged from a situation in which a flawless hero had to overcome contradicting rules. Gawain was obliged to obey the lady’s wishes and honor his host. He had to keep his pact with the monster while avoiding death. (Being dead is incompatible with starring in a chivalrous romance.) But Gawain’s film is already ambivalent about his calling. It’s hard to say what the tests he might be exposed to might prove. The introduction of Essel becomes a further step towards chaotic inwardness: Should Gawain succumb to the charm of his host’s wife, he would betray not an ideal, but a specific woman with whom he has a complex and opaque relationship. (Significantly, Gawain Essel did not take a formal vow as he did with male characters like the knight and the host.)

That Gawain is chivalrously curious at best – in a way, he is a “green” warrior himself – reflects the perspective of the film itself. This is another tectonic shift. The poem’s unknown author, who appears to have been a devout Christian, offers religious criticism of the genre of romances – but respectfully, on the genre’s own terms. Lowery’s challenge is less polite, portraying politeness as manipulation, as a cover for cruelty and betrayal. There is little gallantry in this Camelot. Instead of greeting the Green Knight at their feast as in the text, the men of the round table immediately draw their swords. Sean Harris’s Arthur, weakened by years of moral compromises, boasts of getting the Saxons to “bow their heads like babies”. (Later the camera wanders gloomily over battlefields.) The verse groans with exquisite pleasure – “double servings” of meat and drink, sweet music, gorgeous clothes – in a sweeping defense of the world built by chivalry. But the movie’s palette, at least inside, is dingy and uninviting. There’s goats, dung, a general hostility to showers. Compared to the poem’s content, civilization appears both more fragile and less worth fighting for.

And yet the film seems to dedicate certain human values. When Gawain told Essel that he was looking for “greatness” in the Green Chapel, she replied: “Why is kindness not enough?” Kindness seems to overlap with aspects of chivalry: keep your word, take care of the weak, Help the lost. Still, the film’s broader moral vision remains open. If Gawain ends his turn in a nihilistic game, is that heroic or foolish? Would it be wise or sinful to use magic to save your own life? It is unclear what a happy resolution would look like for our hero – who could end up as a knight, king or death. The destabilization here goes beyond tension, beyond not knowing what Gwalchmai will do when faced with temptation. In this deeply disorienting – and more modern – version of romance, at no point do we know what the protagonist is should to do.

In the absence of an external, structuring ethic, “The Green Knight” plunges into psychological fantasies. Interestingly, this stays true to the text, which is also a hybrid that puts the conventions of French and English courts across a deep vein of Celtic myth. A mysterious lyric appears in the poem’s descriptions of natural and not man-made beauty: “But then autumn comes to harden the grain / to warn it to ripen before winter. / Its dryness makes the dust swirl around / and flings high from the surface of the earth. ”It is this register that the film with its sharp choral soundtrack and its mystical light cascades wants to tap into. The middle act of the film unfolds a series of miraculous encounters of Lowery’s own invention. There are androgynous singing giants and a talking fox. Visual fragments float together in a soft, prophetic mess. I wasn’t thinking of chivalric novels, but of another medieval form, the dream vision, in which the meaning is canceled and the meaning comes in a flash.

This world may be maintained by laws, but they are not the laws of man. Proof of this is the color green, which, according to the host’s wife, played with icy intent by Alicia Vikander, is a shade of growth and decay that persists “when passion dies”. The film deals with literal remains – corpses and skeletons – not as symbols of finality, but as harbingers of an essential permeability between the realm of the living and the dead. When Gawain is attacked and tied up by thieves, the camera slowly pans through the forest before landing on a bundle of rag-covered bones. There is a setback and our hero is back, breaking free. One senses a flirtation with horror here, and the same dark sublimity lies in the poem itself, which, along with its richness and manners, is utterly metallic. (Not to forget the stanza in which Gawain, who awaits his fate in the chapel, hears an unearthly scream: the grinding of an ax.) Both versions insist on the horrors one encounters outside – and equally inside when one thinks one is safe – are part of the thrill, the abundance of being alive.

If this is a deal, it is not the kind that the chivalrous code is supposed to include in its games and gentlemen’s agreements. Lowery seems eager to dispel the frivolous consideration that defines romance as a form. During the strange and meandering middle section of the film, Gawain encounters a young woman, Winifred, who has lost her head. (A Welsh saint by that name was beheaded in the 7th century.) She asks the knight to help her find it. He seems ready to agree and then asks himself, as if remembering his lines, what she will give him for it. “Why are you asking me that,” she replies. “Why would you ever ask me that? ”It is hard, as you look at the scene, not to think of the etymological connection between“ question ”and“ search ”and conclude that Lowery is gallantly trying to revive the second with the first.

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