The Death of Don Quixote
2018 · 13m · España
Directed by Miguel Faus
Genres: biography, drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, theatrical
London, 1968: Alphonse, a young and ambitious filmmaker, tries to complete his greatest work, The Death of Don Quixote, while his ageing star Patrick Quincey falls ill and it becomes unclear who will die first — his vision, Patrick, or Don Quixote.
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A film about a film about a book — it's the kind of recursive, self-aware nested thing that *should* feel precious, but Faus resists the easy irony and actually commits to the melancholy, which makes it weirder than most things trying twice as hard to be strange.
The Death of Don Quixote understands its own genealogy with the kind of thoughtfulness that lingers: a 1968 London studio becomes a meditation on artistic legacy, mortality, and the blurred line between artist and muse, executed with the formal restraint of someone who's studied how cinema talks to literature.
What transforms this from literary conceit into lived experience is Faus's decision to let Patrick Quincey's actual failing body *be* the Don Quixote text — the performance becomes indistinguishable from the document, and that collapse does more work than any clever montage could manage.