The heroes and their legends are a bit like the hen and the egg. It is not easy to decide which came first: the great deed or the story of it. With that you get into a circle just as quickly as with the beginning of human culture as a whole. A new story about the noble knight Gawain is now getting serious with this circle: "The Green Knight" by David Lowery. There has never been a quest like this, and that means something in one of the most venerable genres, the film with swords and chain mail. In the Middle Ages, men sought their way to a higher vocation with a quest. They moved out, endured adventures, ministered to women and became chivalrous in the process. The story of Gawain and the Green Knight dates back to the late 14th century, so it is a late bloom in Arthurian epic.The same is true of “The Green Knight”, which, compared to classics such as John Boorman's “Excalibur” (1981), strikes a much larger cultural-historical arc: notions of antiquity meet modern forms, for example a highly artificial sound design.
The whole thing starts at Christmas in Camelot. “Christ is born” is the first sentence, plus you see the actor Dev Patel, who actually looks like a figure of Christ, but here plays the young Gawain (or Garvain). At the high festival, you want to have a little fun at King Arthur's court, you want to hear stories, “some myth or canto”, but Gawain has nothing of the sort to tell. He hasn't seen anything yet. His first act is imminent, it is just unfolding in a parzen-like act by his mother Morgane la Faye, who conjures up an adventure. It is she who summons the green knight - half man, half tree - who rides high on his horse and with heavy hoofbeats in the middle of the round table. He has a strange desire: he wants to have his head cut off by someone for the pricethat his opponent then has to appear at the Green Chapel a year later in order to have himself beheaded. Gawain agrees to take part in the "game", however strangely unheroic it may seem. The consequences become clear to him in the first hints when the green knight simply picks up his severed head from the ground and runs away with a grim "one year hence".