Lost in La Mancha
Don Quixote is a fairy tale. So is Bleak House, so is Dead Souls. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenin are supreme fairy tales. But without these fairy tales, the world would not be real.
However, Gilliam was once a cartoonist, and some cartoonists are quiet megalomaniacs–having specific visions of how things are supposed to look and accustomed to controlling every inch of available space. This isn’t a problem when the space consists of a piece of drafting paper, but things get more complicated once the space becomes a soundstage or a location filled with crew and cast members.
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I’ve also been unlucky enough to see the boring two-hour atrocity made from poorly duped parts of Welles’s Quixote intercut with parts of a routine documentary series about Spain he made for Italian TV. The thing was quickly cobbled together by Spanish hack director Jesus Franco in 1992–shortly after Gilliam started incubating his own version–and this is the version we’re shown samples of in Lost in La Mancha. It’s lamentable that the Welles Quixote remains out of reach while the Franco Quixote calling itself the Welles Quixote is what we get here. After all, Welles’s film was made out of love, Franco’s for money and glory, though he reaped very little of either. Welles’s footloose and mercurial nature apparently drove him to say to separate individuals on separate occasions, “You are the only one I can trust,” including Mauro Bonanni, the Italian editor of Quixote, who still clings to some of the footage, and Welles’s longtime companion Oja Kodar, who inherited the rest and then sold it to the Filmoteca Espanola in Madrid. As a consequence, the film survives today only in scattered fragments held by disputing factions. Given Welles’s avowed lack of interest in posterity, this might be the sort of outcome he would have wanted.
The major link between the Gilliam and Welles versions of the story is a compulsion to make Quixote and Panza contemporary yet mired within their own historical period. Gilliam’s plan seems to have been to turn Panza into a contemporary character named Toby Grisini (played by Johnny Depp) who’s transported back into Quixote’s era, presumably like the hero of Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Welles kept both characters in their own period in terms of dress, speech, and manners, but planted them in contemporary Spain, making them even more absurdly archaic in their medieval escapades; he derived part of his comedy from the uncanny juxtapositions, such as the don and Panza occupying the same shots as neon signs for Quixote beer.
