Reflecting a potential aesthetic and narrative pattern in recent works shot on video like Michael Mann’s feature-film version of Miami Vice, Albert Serra’s Quixotic (also titled Honor de Cavalleria or “Honor of Knights) uses digital photography and an interstitial narrative that results in a “behind the scenes” effect. This amounts to a film subject that seems almost documentary, a focus on the "non-scenes" that come between the major drama of a typical narrative film, and an interest in the weight, meaning, and importance behind the non-explanative, unspectacular moments that fill the spatial and temporal gaps between scenes of more showy films, the dead time and empty space.

Taking inspiration from Cervantes’ legendarily difficult to adapt novel about Don Quixote, Serra whittles down the plot and the characters until the result is a film that is made up almost entirely Quixote (Lluís Carbó) and his squire-sidekick Sancho (Lluís Serrat) just ambling along the landscape or resting between their travels. Serra employs a dramatic direction that is reminiscent of both both Hou Hsiou-hsien and Roberto Rossellini. Hou’s style is reflected both in the director’s single-camera setups using wandering and open framing, as well as in the script’s shorn minimalist and sparseness of both dialog and story. The Rossellini influence pertains most strongly to Serra’s focus on simple admittance to and revelation in to the existence of Quixote and Sancho in the world. As most of Quixotic’s running time is taken up with the duo foraging through the uninhabited countryside, the movie dedicates itself to a naturalistic portrayal of the two men that emphasizes just how much of Quixote’s picaresque adventures are really just empty, lonely inactivity. The film features no real plot points, only one character other than the duo that speaks, and no locations outside of nature. Lensed by Christophe Farnarier and Eduard Grau, Quixotic uses entirely natural light for its photography, and Serra’s images feel loose and happenstance: avoiding precision in composition, strict or dramatic blocking, and picturesque motivations, Serra lets his scenes play out visually, and if, on the off chance, a moment of movement on the part of the actors is evocative, a particular focal length of the camera catches a grass or flower in the foreground, or the angle and light of sun or moon are just right, Quixotic becomes momentarily beautiful. But there is just as much visual banality in the knight’s life: one lengthy shot at night is so dark that the screen literally appears black for a minute, while in another instance Quixote and Sancho’s slumped, exhausted bodies are immobile in a lovely but almost as obscured image where the only on-camera motion is the arcing, and very slow movement of the moon behind them.

Such staged moments of beauty are rare though, as for the most part the visuals, like the narrative, is happenstance, its sublimity momentary, its concreteness, even its real subject, allusive. Much of the drama, so to speak, is simply Quixote rambling to Sancho, asking him if he notices the splendor of the sky or the day, instructing him to do or find something, as well as profess his love for him and tell him of the path and wonder of God which both Sancho and his master are on. Sancho is mostly a mute presence, and sometimes Quixote notices this and chocks it up to his lazy sleepiness, but more often than not the knight just keeps on talking, questions and observations left unanswered. From this, the film becomes a touchingly minimal study on senility and loneliness. But at the same time Serra maintains an admirable ambivalence between what seem the two poles of the film, namely Quixote’s joy of existence and Sancho’s silent, perhaps bored servitude. The film’s non-dramatic approach to Cervantes can seem dull and somnambulistic in a way that reflects Sancho’s passive, sleepy dedication to Quixote. Yet the intrinsic romanticism of the old knight is charmingly apparent even in this most-inactive of interpretations, from the weary, accepted, and ritualized way he wears his armor to more explicit scenes like a sublime sequence where the knight seems to suit himself up only to struggle against the might of a windy day.

In contrast to the resignation of Sancho, and perhaps his beleaguered admiration of the knight’s romantic appeal, the elision, suppression, or interiorization of Quixote’s adventures in favor of the sage-like but distracted and somewhat dim demeanor of the old knight results in a kind of simple, content contemplation of existence, Quixote’s happiness in being alive and within a world full of potential goodness. Although Serra gives both characters more solemn interiority than external characterization, Quixote’s few coherent speeches to Sancho on the nature of his knighthood are about a world turned sour and the truthful goodness that following the path of God can bring about in the world. Thus much of the film’s “non-scenes” are really about Sancho escorting a dying or mentally deficient Quixote to the end of his days, and the old man is simply basking in the gloriousness of God, seen through nature, far away from the terrors of an immoral, ungodly human world. The audience’s potential incredulity towards this outlook can be found in the wavering dullness of Serra’s film, its rather even chances of achieving cinematic beauty and producing banal images, and reflected in Sancho’s silent, sad sack existence in the narrative. But there is a profound appeal to this Quixote, and to the filmmaker’s serene, contemplative, and sometimes softly joyful look at the melancholy dying days of an old man, and Serra’s unusually spare and humanist approach to such canonical material marks him as a filmmaker to watch in the future.