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If English is your first language and you could translate my old Italian text, please contact me.
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John Boorman (Britain, 1933) nacque in Inghilterra come critico e regista di telefilm o documentari,
ma, dopo il tributo al Merseybeat di
Catch Us If You Can/ Having a Wild Weekend (1965),
crebbe a Hollywood, dove imparò a sfruttare le potenzialità effettive
dell'alto spettacolo a fini espressivi e morali altrettanto sconvolgenti.
Point Blank (1967), tratto dal romanzo "The Hunter" (1963) di Donald Westlake, è un eccezionale film d'azione, un
gangster-film sconnesso e onirico che rinnova il codice linguistico del genere attraverso il doppio lavoro
sul montaggio e sul subconscio.
Lee Marvin è un gangster (Walker) che è stato tradito dalla moglie e da
un complice nella prigione di Alcatraz.
I due fuggono con il bottino di un colpo e lo abbandonano con una
pallottola in corpo.
Ma Marvin si è salvato ed ora è tornato per vendicarsi.
Senza dire una
parola, sbarca a San Francisco e va a trovare la moglie che adesso vive sola, mentre nella mente
tempestano i ricordi.
In un delirio figurativo la notte si porta gli incubi dell'uomo e la vita della donna,
che, sconvolta dal rimorso, si è suicidata.
Il silenzio irreale del vendicatore (e della colonna
sonora) dà la misura della concentrazione e della determinazione con cui Marvin persegue il suo
obiettivo.
Risalito a un commerciante d'auto, lo terrorizza con una infernale corsa in auto.
Questi lo indirizza alla cognata, ma nel locale notturno dove si esibisce la
donna è pronto un agguato: ne consegue una rissa
feroce nel retroscena, sommersa dal clamore del rock psichedelico.
La cognata si mette dalla sua parte,
anche perché il traditore la desidera e le ha ucciso l'amico.
Per penetrare nel grattacielo
dell'organizzazione usa la ragazza come cavallo di Troia. Lei accetta di andare a concedersi all'uomo che
odia, mentre lui, con un'azione diversiva nel palazzo di fronte, distrae le guardie e penetra nell'edificio.
Irrompe nella camera all'ultimo piano dove i due stanno facendo l'amore.
Marvin si fa dare i nomi dei
capi dal vile che, nella colluttazione e nudo com'è, precipita di sotto.
Senza perdere tempo e senza
farsi impressionare, Marvin va a rivendicare i suoi soldi dal capo del defunto.
Questi finge di piegarsi, ma manda all'appuntamento in un canale artificiale il
commerciante d'auto, in odore di disgrazia, con un pacco
pieno di carta invece che di dollari.
Ma Marvin ha intuito che c'è il trucco e pensa bene di
procurarsi un ostaggio.
Va a sequestrare il capo in persona e lo manda in avanscoperta nel canale.
Il killer appostato non distingue il suo mandante e lo fredda al primo colpo.
Con il secondo colpo uccide il disgraziato emissario.
E poi, convinto di avere svolto il proprio lavoro a puntino, ripone l'arma e se ne va.
Marvin, che ha assistito alla scena al coperto, perquisisce i cadaveri.
La caccia continua, anche se salendo
di gerarchia, la lotta con l'organizzazione diventa sempre più impari e feroce.
Ad indicargli la villa del successivo boss è l'ambiguo capo di una
organizzazione rivale che sta cercando di convincere Marvin a mettersi con lui.
Nella villa, mentre aspettano che il pezzo grosso si faccia vivo,
Marvin e la cognata si accapigliano: lei, indispettita perché lui non la degna di uno sguardo
(nonostante si sia inimicata l'organizzazione per lui), mette a soqquadro
la casa e poi da un altoparlante gli rinfaccia la barbara caparbietà
con cui insegue i soldi che in fondo non sono nemmeno suoi. Lui le da` la
caccia per la casa, ma e` come inseguire un fantasma. QUando finalmente la
trova, lei lo colpisce al capo con una stecca da biliardo.
E lui finalmente la prende, per
terra (ma vede se stesso far l'amore con sua moglie, e poi il traditore far
l'amore con sua moglie). L'incantesimo che gli impediva di pensare al sesso
sembra spezzato.
Quando arriva il padrone della villa, Marvin lo terrorizza.
Si accordano per la consegna della somma di notte in un anfiteatro abbandonato
della prigione di Alcatraz.
Ci vanno insieme. L'elicottero arriva e deposita il pacco bene in vista.
Ma quando sembra finita, il boss nelle mani di Marvin viene fatto
fuori dal boss che aveva aiutato Marvin fin dal principio e che ora rivela di
essere l'ultimo socio rimasto,
quello che sarebbe venuto subito dopo nella lista della vendetta.
Marvin se ne resta immobile nell'oscurità, a spiare l'ambiguo sinistro
alleato, che ha sfruttato cinicamente la sua sete di vendetta per eliminare i concorrenti alla scalata al
potere e che ore cerca di sedurlo con l'offerta di un impiego stabile al suo servizio.
All'alba desiste e se ne va, lasciandogli i soldi.
Marvin è un vendicatore irriducibile; ma non è soltanto sete di
vendetta a spingerlo in avanti, tant'è vero che non si ferma neppure dopo che i due traditori sono
morti. Lui ha bisogno di tornare in possesso di quel bottino, vuol vedere rispettata una giustizia assurda,
che per lui è tutto. Quel denaro è lo scopo della sua vita, ha un senso quasi
metafisico.
Preso nella ragnatela di una organizzazione Kafkiana, della quale non riesce mai
a vedere il vero volto, solo e impotente, si scaraventa contro il nemico come un kamikaze. Il propellente
psichico, la ridda di pensieri, sogni e ricordi che sciabola fitte atroci nella mente, si esaurisce solo quando
l'obiettivo è raggiunto; davanti alla necessità di scegliere la sua nuova vita, l'uomo
vacilla, confuso e smarrito.
Marvin compie un itinerario metafisico che lo porta nello stesso punto da cui
è partito, senza aver risolto il suo vero problema: il senso dell'esistenza, spezzato quel giorno in
cui perse moglie e amico, e con loro tutte le sue certezze.
Boorman si serve di tecniche apprese dal documentario, da Resnais, dalla
psichedelia. Il suo obiettivo è il subconscio. Regista visionario, crea il mito di un fantasma
invincibile ed immortale.
Hell in the Pacific (1968) è un apologo quasi alla Golding
sulla convivenza umana. Un pilota americano e un ufficiale giapponese devono dividersi un'isola deserta;
stabiliscono le regole per non doversi controllare di continuo e finiscono per diventare anche amici, ma la
guerra li separerà di nuovo.
Leo the Last (1970), based on George Tabori's play "The Prince",
conferma l'intento "brechtiano" del precedente:
l'ultimo erede di una nobile dinastia si rifugia in un quartiere popolare e sembra condannato a trascorrere
l'esistenza nella contemplazione della miseria che quelli della sua razza hanno causato.
Deliverance (1972), an adaptation of James Dickey's novel (1970), e` un film molto piu` mainstream dei precedenti, pur essendo ancora un apologo sulla socialità dell'animale uomo, soprattutto quando al di fuori della rete di inibizioni del mondo civilizzato.
Four ordinary, average, middle-class men decide to spend a weekend canoeing
down a river. They know that a dam is being built that will destroy the river.
They pick a place at random and start their trip on two canoes.
One of the canoe is attacked by two abominable men of the woods, who
sodomize one of the two tourists and are about to do the same to the other
one when their friends rescue them and kill one of the attackers (their leader
kills him, with a bow).
The friends argue on what to do with the corpse, and eventually agree that
the best thing is to bury it in the forest and not tell the police.
The friends resume the journey but tragedy strikes again: the rapids claim
the life of one of them, and the leader, in a desperate attempt to rescue
him, loses a leg. They are obviously lost.
One of them climbs a steep wall of rock to look for the wild man who escaped:
it's their only hope of finding their way out of the canyon.
He finds him, but then has to kill him in order to save his own life.
Then he slips and, after quite a jump, falls in the water.
The three survivors resume their journey down the river.
If nothing else, they find the corpse of the partner that drowned, but then
they decide to lose it because it would arise suspicions.
So when they finally reach a town, they concoct a story that they simply
had an accident and got wounded: they don't want to have to explain the
killing of two people. But their story does not hold water (the second canoe
is found upriver from where they claim the accident happened, there were
four life-jackets, and so on). The sheriff can't find any evidence that they
committed a crime, though, so he lets them go.
Outside workers are moving a church and even a graveyard, before they all
get submerged by the new lake that the dam will create.
Boorman's best and worst can be found in the
oneiric
post-apocalyptic sci-fi film
Zardoz (1974), which
is a multi-layered philosophical story with stunning visuals.
Zardoz is a god who keeps laughing and saying that "it's all a joke".
The eternals are on a quest for mortality, a sendup of the human race's quest for
immortality.
Zardoz's creature Zed gets enlightened not by a holy scripture but instead by a children's book.
This savage restores the natural cycle of life, i.e. the human condition,
realizing that a higher force (Nature) is manipulating all of them, whether gods or savages.
The film has visuals that predate, by half a century, augmented reality and a concept of the "tabernacle" that predates the "singularity".
The second half becomes a sort of psychedelic "trip" which consists of a flow of incoherent actions.
Zed is both Dante who journeys to hell and paradise and Ulysses who tries to return home via an enchanted world.
Before the film opens, a character named
Arthur Frayn introduces himself. He tells us that he is Zardoz and is immortal.
Immortality is not a blessing and he longs to die, but death is now impossible.
The film is his story, and he warns us that
it is set in a possible future, not in the past.
He admits that he will impersonate
a fake god in that he
is the puppet master who manipulates the characters of the story.
He admits that he himself is invented... for our
entertainment (invented by the filmmaker).
The story is set in 2293 after an undisclosed apocalyptic catastrophe.
A giant flying face-shaped stone lands on a hill and
a group of masked horseriders (whose masks are replicas of the stone) rush
to deliver food to it. They worship Zardoz as a god. Zardoz does not appear
but calls them the "chosen" ones, raised to kill the Brutals "who multiply", and we understand that
he is referring to humans. The giant face erupts guns that the riders accept
with jubilation. They chant that the penis is evil and set out to their mission
of exterminating copulating humans. One of the riders, though, named Zed (Sean
Connery), hides in the grain delivered to Zardoz and therefore enters the stone face. As he explores it, he finds a gallery of mummified people. Finally, Zardoz
appears (the Arthur of the first scene) and Zed kills him while the giant face
lifts off. Flying out of the spaceship, Arthur/Zardoz tells Zed that he just killed his own god. The giant face lands in a green valley by a lake.
The half-naked, savage Zed explores the village and stumbles into a crystal
that materializes messages in the air.
He hides from the people who live there. He wanders in the garden and sees a mirage: a sort of Lady Godiva, a naked woman on a horse. He encounters and is paralyzed by a woman who is a scientist, May. She guesses that he must be one of Zardoz's
exterminators and wonders how he managed to infiltrate the Vortex.
He confesses that he learned from Zardoz that people in the Vortex have the gift of immortality.
She uses her mental power to interrogate him. She takes him in a room where she
and another woman, Consuella, use a crystal to ask the Tabernacle to visualize Zed's
memories. More people enter the room and watch on a giant screen the video of
Zed and his gang shooting unarmed people on a beach. The eternals want to know
what happened to Arthur/Zardoz but cannot extract that memory from Zed.
Consuella is alarmed by Zed's intrusion into the Vortex, a young man named Friend is intrigued by the savage, and May wants to study him.
Zed is the first mortal they have seen in 200 years.
The eternals vote and the majority chooses to keep him for a while so May can study him.
May sequences his DNA and tells Zed that he is a mutant, genetically engineered by Arthur.
We learn that Arthur was the only one visiting the lands of the mortals and was running an experiment.
The eternals interact all the time with the Tabernacle, a sort of omniscient
computer that we never see. The Tabernacle is also the force that keeps the eternals from dying.
Friend shows Zed around and Zed learns that the village includes two odd groups:
the apathetic, who don't respond to any action, and the renegades, who have been condemned to eternal old age because they broke the rules.
Consuella runs her own weird experiment on Zed. They have not experienced an erection
and Consuella is curious to see which images will cause one. She shows Zed erotic
videos and there's no reaction, but then Zed stares at her intently and gets an erection, thus embarrassing Consuella.
Consuella is hostile and keeps voting to kill him.
Friend tells Zed that the life of the immortals is boring and he longs to die.
Friend's behavior is so irreverent and rebellious that the eternals decide
to punish him: he becomes a renegade, an old man.
When the renegades learn from Friend that Zed is a mortal, they attack him, jealous of his ability to die.
Friend introduces Zed to the scientist who invented the whole Vortex, the only one who knows the secret of the Tabernacle, but even that scientist doesn't know how to destroy what he created.
Consuella keeps asking to terminate Zed, whose mere existence is obviously spreading hatred among them.
May instead continues her mental interrogation of Zed and Zed confesses the event that changes his life. One day a mysterious being lured him into a library and showed him a book to learn the alphabet. Zed learned to read and fell in love with the library. And then one day he found a book that terrified him. Zed refuses
to tell May the title of the book.
May wants to know what happened to Arthur/Zardoz, but Zed still refuses to say.
Nonetheless, May guesses that Zed murdered his own god. Zed finally confesses why
he rebeled against Zardoz: one day Zardoz told them to stop killing and to start
farming, but they were raised to be hunters, not farmers.
Zed finally confesses what is the book that changed his life:
the "Wizard of Oz", a harmless children's book, but also the title from which
the word "Zardoz" derives.
At the peak of the confession, Zed and Maya hug to make love. Consuella finds
them and wants to immediately punish Maya with 50 years of aging. Zed manages
to stop her but is left blind.
The Lady Godiva appears to Zed and from this point on it is not clear if it is all a dream of reality. She heals him of his blindness and tells him how the rich and powerful created the Vortex when the world was dying, and abandoned the crowds to die outside the Vortex. She accuses him of having contaminated the commune
with his hatred for Zardoz. Now they are all becoming hunters and killers.
In fact, Consuella leads a posse to capture him and kill him.
Zed hides among the apathetics. These people revive by licking his sweat and
kissing him.
Zed flees also from them and is captured and saved by the old renegades.
The renegades deliver Zed (disguised in a bridal dress) to Friend, who delivers him to May. May now reveals that her true mission
is to create a new race: she asks him to inseminate them all and in return
they will teach him all they know.
The last 30 minutes of the film are a delirious high-tech psychedelic trip.
Maya transfers all her knowledge telepathically into Zed's mind, who therefore
is bombarded by a whirlwind of images.
Friend (now an old man)
explains to Zed that all the original
scientists got bored of immortality and wanted to die and so they were all
punished with eternal old age: they are the renegades. Unfortunately, when they
created the Vortex, they also erased their own memories to make sure that nobody
would ever destroy the Tabernacle that keeps the Vortex going.
Friend, Maya and Consuella and the other eternals are their offspring, born into the Vortex, which is basically a spaceship. Zed sees it as a prison and starts
shouting "Kill the tabernacle!" inside a room of mirrors.
Friend continues the story and explains that a
crystal implanted in their heads communicates with the Tabernacle.
Maya has completed the transfer of knowledge and tells Zed that his next step
is to see inside a particular crystal. Zed only sees a reflection of himself.
He is now alone in the building. He hears a sound. He finds Arthur/Zardoz
in a gallery of wax figures, dressed like a magician.
He laughs at Zed's shocked expression and at his desire for destruction.
Zardoz hands Zed a crystal ball. While Zed is staring inside it,
Consuella's posse breaks into the building. Consuella tries to stab Zed to death
but can't and admits that she loves him. In fact, she tells her posse that
Zed is not there, therefore saving his life.
Zed can't see anything inside the ball just like he can't see anything inside
the crystal. He asks the crystal questions and gets answers from the Tabernacle.
And then it dawns on him: he is holding the Tabernacle in the palm of his hand,
the crystal itself.
The Tabernacle tries to convince Zed to become part of the Vortex but Zed
refuses and starts shooting. Zed has fallen into the crystal and shoots
in a room of mirrors, haunted by visions of the eternals, and ends up
killing himself. The Tabernacle announces that he has destroyed the Vortex.
His not dead after all because Friend and the women found him and Consuella
revives him with a kiss. Zed leads the eternals out of the building.
Zed visits the old scientist who is dying and who realizes the truth:
they challenged Nature by inventing immortality and Nature responded by creating Zed who destroyed them.
Te old scientist dies and the giant stone face falls from the sky.
Zed sends Maya towards the exit of the Vortex while Consuella and Friend remain with Zed and eternals dance happily to the news that they have become mortal.
Arthur/Zardoz suddenly shows up among the chaos to take credit for the outcome:
he tells Zed that he planned it all, from the careful choice of Zed's parents to produce a rebel like Zed, to luring him into the library and showing him the
book. Arthur even claims that he engineered Zed's incursion into the stone face and his own assassination. Zed, unimpressed, replies that a higher force engineered Arthur's actions. They have all been used.
The eternals gather around a pool to say goodbye to immortality.
Avalow (the Lady Godiva character) standing in the middle of the pool begs Zed to liberate her. Zed points the gun to kill her but then refrains. Someone else shoots her:
the exterminators entered the Vortex thanks to Zed's disabling of the Tabernacle.
The exterminators start shooting the eternals who beg to be shot.
Zed flees with Consuella.
Arthur pulls a bird out of his dress, his last trick, before being gunned down
with Friend. Before dying they remark that "It was all a joke".
Zed and Consuella hide in a cave and make love. We see her getting pregnant,
a child being born and growing up, they getting old, and eventually the child
getting up and leaving the cave. Only two skeletons are left in the cave,
holding hands.
La fantascienza di Boorman è comunque selvaggia e terrestre,
più vicina alle leggende mitologiche, alla Bibbia, ai poemi omerici, alle mille e una notte della
tradizione celtica che alle saghe tecnologiche di Hollywood. Irrazionale fino allo spiritualismo, Boorman
continua a disquisire sull'essenza dell'essere umano, valendosi di toni metafisici e di un repertorio
inesauribile di virtuosismi figurativi. Rielaborando miti antichi e moderno con opulenti e diaboliche
magie visive, con un catalogo stordente di enigmi iconografici, Boorman racconta una favola per bambini
che diventa una satira dell'umanità (il dio di Zardoz non è altro che un illusionista da
varietà che si è ispirato al "Wizard of Oz".
Exorcist 2 (1977), the sequel to William Friedkin's The Exorcist, dilaga nei meandri del misticismo e del demonismo
in un modo sempre più semplicistico. L'horror demoniaco di Friedkin si tramuta in un forsennato
delirio figurativo onirico, etnico e filosofico.
Un gesuita fruga nel mistero della morte del suo maestro,
l'esorcista del film precedente, e scopre così che un demone si rivela attraverso le crisi epilettiche
di una giovane, la fanciulla del film di Friedkin ora cresciuta, matura e collaborativa. Ha inizio una lotta
tenace fra i due emissari dei diversi poteri morali, in un caleidoscopio di incubi, visioni e magie. Un
viaggio nei tenebrosi paesaggi della mente, che riporta a galla rituali di altre epoche e di altri continenti e
scene di morte.
Excalibur (1980), a retelling of the medieval legend of
"King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table",
is a baroque reconstruction of an era of violence and superstition.
Merlin is shown as a sort of Greek prophet, who misses the classic era
when people were pure (when Excalibur was forged). Nonetheless, it is Merlin himself who plots the
descent into evil.
It feels like Merlin is a metaphor for today's incoherent modern humankind,
which now has to sail through the depraved corrupt mess that itself has created.
Merlin is the irrational that helps the rational dig its own grave.
The film is overlong and predictable, a descendant of DeMille's epics, with
many embarrassing dialogues and cheap visual tricks.
However, Borman turns the legend of Arthur into a
Greek tragedy a` la Sophocles or a "lite" version of Shakespeare.
But the story, which is an epic in the original version of a thousand years earlier, ends up feeling like a soap opera a thousand years later.
And the acting is as approximate as the acting in soap operas precisely because
the story is so implausible and full of medieval stereotypes.
And whatever merits the story has are Chretien's merits, not Borman's.
For what it's worth:
Merlin is the most contradictory character here, a magician with supernatural powers who somehow cannot resist when humans ask him to do something stupid, an old man who is nostalgic about the golden age of myth and regrets that humankind is abandoning the old myths (and maybe he's also just tired of having been used by humans to carry out their silly and deadly intrigues);
Morgana spends her entire life plotting revenge against Merlin, who helped kill her father and rape her mother, and against Arthur, the product of that rape;
Modred is the monster child of an incestuous mother, programmed to become a parricide, the ultimate product of Morgana's hatred;
Guinevere is the saintly sinner who represents the common woman, not perfect but compassionate and loving;
Lancelot proves that the ideal man is utopia and in fact turns out to be the cause of countless disasters, and presumably feels guilty for it but fails until the end of accept the only way he can redeem himself (by killing himself);
Arthur is an idiot who becomes and remains king only because of the manipulations of a wizard, who neglects his wife and is responsible for her falling in love with his best friend, who is incapable of running his kingdom without some magical powers to help him out just like he is incapable of fighting a war without the magical sword, which is the reason that he sends all his knights to die in the desperate search for the magical object that will restore his power and his intelligence;
Perceval is the common man, born to be a silly peasant, but ultimately the only one in the whole saga who never betrays anybody and never commit atrocities, the real hero of the story.
Merlin watches as Uther and his men slaughter enemies in a battle.
Uther demands the sword that Merlin has promised, a sword that confers
superpowers to the warrior. Merlin delivers the sword (that emerges from
a lake) and Uther's enemy immediately surrenders.
The enemy
(the Duke of Cornwall)
invites Uther to his castle where they feast together.
Uther falls madly in love with the host's sexy wife,
Igrayne, who performs an orgasmic dance, but his lust risks destroying the
alliance that has just been forged. Merlin warns him in vain. Uther is mad with
love and sets siege to Cornwall's castle. Another bloody battle is beginning.
Uther begs Merlin to help with magic. Merlin accepts but upon one condition:
that Uther's son will be his.
While Cornwall is away (looking for Uther),
Merlin transforms Uther into a clone of Cornwall so that he is easily admitted
into the castle.
The real Cornwall is being killed in battle (and his little daughter Morgana sees it),
but the clone appears and Igrayne sleeps with him.
Later the dead body of the real Uther is taken back to the castle.
Nine months later Uther, who has taken over Cornwall's castle, reveals to Igrayne that he is the father and pledges to love the newborn baby.
But Merlin appears to demand what Uther promises: the child.
Uther keeps the promise despite Igrayne's cries and walks away carring in
his arms the little Arthur.
Uther changes his mind and rides after Merlin but is ambushed by Cornwall knights.
Uther, cornered, calls in vain Merlin. With his last remaining strength, Uther
thrusts Excalibur into a big rock. None of the knights can pull the sword out
of it. Uther dies. Merlin proclaims that who can pull the sword out of the rock shall be king and then looks at the baby in his arms ad predicts that Arthur will be the one.
The years go by and Arthur is adopted by Sir Ector, and raised as the brother
of Ector's son Kay.
When he is already a young man, Ector takes his sons to a jousting tournament
in which the knights are fighting for the right to pull the sword.
The winner, Sir Leondegrance, tries in vain to pull Excalibur from the rock.
A child steals Kay's sword and, looking for a replacement, Arthur simply pulls Excalibur from the rock.
A crowd rushes to watch the miracle. The knights are shocked that a humble boy
succeeded where they failed. Merlin appears to tell Arthur that he is the son
of Uther and Igrayne, not of Ector.
Leondegrance immediately recognizes Arthur as the new king, but other knights
refuse to acknowledge a bastard as their king.
A terrified Arthur runs away. At night he is surrounded by animals in the forest.
Merlin appears again to tell him that the forest is haunted by a dragon.
Merlin tells Arthur to simply sleep and dreams.
In the morning Arthur practices using the sword.
Merlin tells Arthur that his father Uther was a great king but too rash.
Merlin prods him to join the loyal Ector and Leondegrance in the fight against the rebels led by Sir Uryens.
With help from Merlin, they repel Uryens' assault on Leondegrance's castle.
During the battle Leondegrance's daughter Guinevere is impressed by Arthur's courage.
Arthur captures Uryens and demands that he surrenders.
Uryens, a noble knight, refuses because Arthur is nobody.
Then Arthur simply hands him Excalibur and asks him to be knighted.
Uryens is tempted to kill him with Excalibur but a superior force
makes him accept Arthur as his king in front of his troops and other knights.
Leondegrance's daughter Guinevere takes care of Arthur's wounds and they kiss.
Merlin warns Arthur that, if he marries Guinevere, he will be betrayed by a beloved friend.
Years go by and Arthur reigns over the land but one day a shining white knight,
Lancelot,
blocks a bridge and refuses to move until someone will defeat him in duel.
Arthur loses the duel. Lancelot is clearly a superior warrior, but Arthur
calls on Excalibur's superpowers. Now Arthur defeats Lancelot with just one
strike but also breaks the magic sword.
Merlin is shocked and dismayed.
Arthur is ashamed that he couldn't fight fairly, ashamed of his own vanity.
Arthur throws the sword into the lake.
The Lady of the Lake appears underwater having restored the sword and, smiling,
hands back to Arthur.
Lancelot is alive and is happy to have been defeated because he finally found a king worthy of being served.
Arthur, Lancelot and the other knights conquer the whole land.
After a speech by Merlin, Arthur announces to the knights that he will build
a Round Table and the castle of Camelot.
Lancelot is charged with escorting Guinevere to Arthur for the royal wedding.
Along the way Lancelot confesses to Guinevere that he loves her but also
promises that he will love her as the wife of his best friend.
At the wedding Cornwall's daughter Morgana, Arthur's half-sister, shows up
and confronts Merlin, revealing that she has been studying the magic to become
like Merlin.
She proves that she knows the secret of the herbs and that she can see the
future. She remembers that Merlin took Arthur away from her mother.
She wants to become Merlin's apprentice.
Lancelot is riding in the forest when he is stalked by a young savage peasant,
Perceval. Perceval
catches a hare and roasts it for Lancelot and begs him to accepts him as his
servant. He runs the whole way with Lancelot (who is riding his horse) to Camelot.
While Perceval wanders around the castle amazed by what he sees, and eventually
runs into Merlin, Lancelot refuses Arthur's invitation to stay, clearly to
stay away from Guinevere.
At the feast of the Round Table knights, Guinevere is clearly upset that
Lancelot is missing. Morgana points it out to Gawain. Then she flirts with
Merlin, determined to learn his secrets.
Arthur asks Merlin is they have completely defeated evil, now that the kingdom
is at peace, and Merlin replies that evil is always where one doesn't expects it to be. Seconds later Gawain accuses Guinevere of being evil, of being the
cause why Lancelot, the best of them, is not there.
Arthur, furious, decrees that Lancelot must challenge Gawain in duel,
in order to defend both Guinevere's honor and Lancelot's own honor.
Lancelot is alone in the woods, begging God to purge him of his love for Guinevere. Lancelot falls asleep is naked, and dreams that an armored knight appears
and tries to kill him: it is Lancelot himself.
At the duel Lancelot doesn't show up. No knight is willing to take his place to
defend Guinevere's honor. Only Lancelot's servant Perceval does, but he is just a peasant.
Arthur knights Perceval on the spot, and Perceval, who doesn't even own an armor, is ready to fight Gawain.
But before Perceval can begin the duel with Gawain, Lancelot rides in and takes Perceval's place.
Lancelot, although wounded, defeats Gawain. Lancelot is tempted to finish him
but then lets him leave and collapses to the ground.
Guinevere tends to the wounded Lancelot. When Lancelot wakes up from his slumber, he finds himself in her arms.
Merlin cures Lancelot and Lancelot decides to leave the castle.
Guinevere, however, follows him in the forest and they have passionate sex.
Arthur asks Merlin whether the lovers are together and Merlin confirms.
Arthur now remembers Merlin's warning that his best friend would betray him.
Arthur asks Merlin for advice but Merlin is ready to die.
Merlin finds Morgana preparing potions and scorns her.
Merlin takes Morgana in his secret cave, where he can see the future and
shows her Lancelot and Guinevere sleeping naked in the forest and Arthur, who has found them, ready to kill them.
However, Merlin performs an exorcism in the cave (resulting in multiple
explosions) and Arthur in the forest thrusts the sword in the ground, sparing the lovers.
The sword appears in the cave and pierces in the chest.
As he is dying, Morgana steals from him the secret of transforming into someone else, swearing revenge for what Merlin did to her mother.
She leaves the cave swearing to find a man and give birth to a god.
Morgana's man is her half-brother Arthur: while he is asleep, she presents to
him as Guinevere and has sex with him. Then she reveals to be Morgana and tells
him that she is pregnant of the next king.
In the next scene the baby is already born,
Mordred, amid thunder and lightning.
A lightning pierces through Arthur himself, weakening him.
Remember that Arthur is also deprived of Excalibur, which has been left in the woods.
The country falls to widespread famine. The people invoke help from the king.
A faint Arthur orders his knights to search for the Holy Grail (the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper) as the only
hope to save the kingdom. The knights, including an aged Perceval, ride away in a landscape of utter desolation and destruction.
Ten years later Perceval seems to be the only knight who is still searching.
One day he meets an armored knight wearing a mask who claims to know where
the Holy grail is. Perceval follows him and finds himself trapped in
Morgana's lair: the knight removes his mask to reveal that he is her son Mordred.
Many knights have become her slaves.
Morgana hallucinates Perceval and then hangs him in a cellar full of dead
knights hanging from the ceiling: Perceval sees
the Holy Grail but cannot get it (a lengthy scene of cheap visual tricks).
Perceval is saved by sheer luck.
Meanwhile, Morgana instructs Mordred that some day he will be king without any need for weapons.
The film fast forwards to an adult Mordred for whom Morgana has concocted
a golden armor. She dispatches him to challenge Arthur.
An aged and weak Arthur replies to Mordred's arrogance by offering his love.
Mordred rides away promising to return and take Camelot by force.
Perceval is alive, alone in the forest, and sees Mordred ambush and murder
Uryens, who refuses to betray Arthur. Perceval is now the last knight of the Round table still alive.
As he wanders in the woods, he runs into a column of destitute and plagued people, who, furious with all knights, scorn him and beat him up.
They throw him in the river. Perceval recognizes their leader, who is now no
more than a fanatical savage long-haired preacher dressed in monk robes, as Lancelot,
clearly still mad at Arthur and his followers.
Perceval is still determined to find the Holy Grail for Arthur. As he emerges
from the river, naked after removing his armor (i.e. returning to be a common
peasant instead of a royal knight) he has a vision of Arthur and finds the Holy Grail and
instantly he is transported (still naked) in Camelot.
Arthur doesn't seem surprised at all: he drinks from the Holy Grail, regains
his strength and prepares to fight Mordred in battle.
Arthur visits Guinevere who is now a nun in a convent
to atone for her adultery, and Arthur begs her forgiveness.
It turns out that she has hidden Excalibur all those years and returns it to Arthur.
Arthur, with help from his adopted brother Kay, assembles his army on a hill and watches Mordred's army down in the valley.
Arthur, alone on the hill, invokes Merlin and, sure enough, Merlin speaks to
him from the otherworld and then performs magic in Morgana's tent, neutralizing her magical powers: she instantly turns into an old woman and
is strangled to death by her own terrified son Mordred.
In the battle, fought in
the magical fog emitted from Morgana's mouth,
Arthur, who now has Excalibur, and Mordred, who apparently is still invulnerable thanks to Morgan's magic, cannot prevail over each other.
Lancelot rides in, surprising the king and altering the balance of power.
But Lancelot dies, begging Arthur's forgiveness, and learning from Arthur that
Guinevere has been restored as queen.
Mordred is now alone, still alive and ready to kill his father Arthur.
Perceval moves in to fight him, but Arthur decides to fight him in person.
They kill each other. Upon dying, Arthur orders Perceval (the only survivor)
to throw Excalibur in the lake (and the Lady of the Lake catches it), for the next king to find it.
Then Perceval witnesses Arthur being taken on a funeral barge
by three women dressed in white towards Paradise.
Emerald Forest (1985) è la storia di ciò che capita fra
il momento in cui il figlioletto di un ingegnere, impegnato nella costruzione di una diga, viene rapito da
una tribù della foresta amazzonica e il momento in cui si ricongiungono, dieci anni dopo. La
trama è in realtà il pretesto per scenari di natura selvaggia, rituali primitivi, e avventure
gratuite, di visualismo antropologico.
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