Don Quixote

Watching this made me think of the TV show Chopped. If you're not familiar, it's a cooking reality competition show, where four chefs compete over three courses, forced to make dishes with four mystery ingredients they only find out about moments before cooking. Don Quixote made me think of Chopped because there's a solid debate about ownership and responsibility when it comes to creating something. Yes, the chefs put together the meals, but they didn't select the ingredients. The producers did that, but they didn't cook the meal or put together the ingredients. So, who is responsible for the meal? Don Quixote is like that. Orson Welles conducted principal photography for the project between 1957 and 1969, but he was always tinkering and thinking of new material, amassing over a thousand pages of script by the time he passed away in 1985. Though he had hours of film, he had no written roadmap for how to assemble it, and in fact purposefully mislabeled the canisters the reels were stored in to confuse anyone who might decide to try and finish it off after his death. This did not stop Jesus Franco, who cobbled together what he thought the best version of the story possible was from the film made available to him by several people who had it, including Welles' companion Oja Kodor. So whose movie is Don Quixote: Welles, the man who scripted it, cast it, and filmed it, or Franco, the man who assembled it? It's impossible to say, but one thing is certain upon watching it: it was futile for Franco to think he could make heads or tails out of Welles' barely-formed sketches of film, let alone cobble together a film worth watching. Forget that trying to imitate a director with the style of Welles, even if only by playing editor to his unmapped footage, is a fool's errand. Putting Don Quixote together was insanity, simply because the pieces available weren't worth assembling to begin with. If what is in the movie is the best, I shudder to think what got left in the bin. There is no narrative to speak of with Don Quixote, or, if there is, it is impossible to focus on it. The terrible voice-over acting is like listening to someone read the phone book while laying inside a tin casket. There doesn't seem to be any character progression, any story, any themes explored, any anything whatsoever for the viewer to latch onto. It is not fragmented in the way Christopher Nolan's non-linear narratives are, or even Welles' own movies like Citizen Kane or F For Fake are; it is fragmented in the way a window is when someone throws a brick through it. Scenes do not flow into and from one another so much as they are smashed into each other like two sumo wrestlers. I would say the movie is stitched together haphazardly, but only if those haphazard conditions were a 8.9 earthquake. It doesn't help that the visuals are a mess; Welles used three different kinds of cameras (35mm, 16mm, and Super 16mm), which resulted in varying quality, and the variances in storage conditions had effects on the footage. This results in the movie being, in a literal sense, nearly unwatchable, or at least a visual assault the likes of which would give the Devil nightmares. You don't want to look at the screen, but the droning ADR'ed dialogue (which runs THE ENTIRE MOVIE) is so lacking in charm or interest, it begins to make you wonder if the movie was intentionally created to get people to stop watching. Some kind of anti-art that exists solely to torture its viewers into boredom. But whose fault is it? Is it Welles, for shooting a rambling, incoherent mess of improvised dialogue, endlessly adding bits and pieces and intentionally leaving no notes behind for someone to finish what he could not? Or is it Franco, who had the audacity to think he could blindly cobble together a cohesive narrative from all these disparate parts and make it even remotely resemble the completed intentions of a titan of filmmaking? After writing all this, I decided that I don't care whose fault it is. It just sucks.