Rencontre avec le dragon (2003) Reviews

• A rare love story

  arsenick2006-02-13

  Go and watch this movie if you like beautiful pictures including landscapes of high mountains, beaches and sandy moors, but also incredibly realistic sets of castles, dark forest, and the salesbrokes and wardrobes of all characters. You really make a time travel to the middle ages, in France. People are violent,sad and severe, not very talkative. Legends are part of domestic life and are not separate from reality, unsafety surrounds each one, and fantasy is real(for example: the nightly transformation into a boar, of a widow knight). Inside this universe, deep characters are painted by magnificent actors: Auteuil, Melki, Emmanuelle Devos and Maurice Garrel. They evolve into 2 dramatic love stories: Guillaume de Montauban, a famous and daring former crusader, is tormented by the fire burning through his body since he was young and saved his best friend from a forest burning. This fire granted him with a formidable strength (the strength of the Dragon) as well as the nickname "the Red Dragon", fearless, heartless and banned from death. He is also tormented by a sin he committed towards his best friend and the latter's wife whom he was in love too, and slayed. Guillaume will be followed by his squire,a young orphan idealizing the Dragon, and his former best friend, who is now a wild man, becoming a boar each night and an amnesic man each morning. The second drama is the mission given by the Pope to Guillaume: chasing a young poet being the pope's favourite who escaped from him to join his bride, a chief-nun. Guillaume has an adversary in this mission, a young and brutal Knight trying to kill him. Do not think about any action or adventure film, even if you have some in it, but rather of a drama. I am willing to watch more movies directed by Hélène Angel.

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• Incomprehensible

  YohjiArmstrong2011-07-04

  THE RED KNIGHT is about the titular knight, a Crusader returned to France, who is sent on a mission with his idealistic young squire to look for the favourite poet of the Pope, who has run away for love. The Red Knight is assisted by various companions and opposed by an evil knight. On paper that sounds like the start of a good action-adventure flick. This is not that flick. This is art house. This is a baffling, often incomprehensible, film. Rather than a story, things just sort of happen. The medieval world shown is hilariously inaccurate. The costuming for instance, is half-fantasy and half a plundering of historical period. 15th century armour competes with Norman haircuts from the 11th century competes with total invention. But hey? Terry Gilliam does that all the time and his movies are great! Well, Helene Angel is no Gilliam. Gilliam succeeds for two reasons. Firstly, his stories are so wild that there is always an anticipation; what will be the next wild flight of fancy? Secondly, he grounds his films in reality. Sure, a bunch of dwarfs have stolen a map that can allow them to cross time and space, but when they meet Napoleon you have no doubt that his soldiers get lice or chase women. In contrast this film is pure and total fantasy throughout. The costumes in this film might be interesting but they don't make up for the lack of reality or excitement throughout. The film just leaps from one situation to another, with no respect either to common sense or to history. Like most medieval films the intellectual and spiritual life shown on screen owes more to modern beliefs about what they thought than what they actually did think. After a while the viewer becomes frustrated and bored with the odd characters and the nonsensical plot and resigns themselves to looking at the pretty images (and they are pretty). All in all a total waste of good actors, set-designers/costume department and cameramen for want of a decent script or director.

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• An unpleasant encounter

  dbdumonteil2005-09-19

  Back to the Middle Ages with a vengeance! But do not expect "les visiteurs du soir"!Do not expect a good old swashbuckler either.This must be one of the poorest offerings of the early years of the twenty-first century French cinema. Plot:the pope has lost his favorite poet and he will highly reward the one who brings the fugitive back.Good and bad knights are looking for him.Auteuil,whose behavior does not make any sense -at least to my eyes-is one of them,flanked by his squire and ,from time to time ,by a nun.Now and then,another companion is shouting (and I mean shouting) and I sincerely do not know the reason why. Take to your heels

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