Film Review: Gawain and the Green Knight (1991)
Recently I was looking for queer arthouse Arthurian cinema, since most Arthurian adaptations I know of are commercial, either intended for a juvenile audience, considered goofy and unserious, or heteronormative as hell. My flatmate was convinced that this genre didn’t exist and made fun of me for it, which only motivated me further. I stumbled upon this Reddit post compiling all Arthurian movies, and I noticed that there were a number of Green Knight adaptations. Based on my limited knowledge of the original poem, whose queer elements were integral to the story, I thought this was a reasonable place to start. I wanted to start with the earliest 1974 version, but found the 1991 version directed by John Michael Phillips free on Youtube so I watched that first instead.
In short, I was very glad that I found it and it’s becoming one of my favorite period/period adjacent movies of all time. Obviously it’s not high-budget and the special effects feel dated, but to me these are very minor things that don’t matter as much as the literary interpretation and intention. The film was made for Christmas, and it feels like a relic from a time in postwar British television when people were trying to make “serious” and intellectual art that was still accessible to the public. What immediately struck me was how the producers took the source material seriously and adapted it faithfully. None of the action deviates from the text, the dialogue reproduces some of the alliterations in the poem (which are beautiful and impressive), the acting is excellent and very professional. The poem has a lot of thematic elements that are not strictly “plot” or action, but the film captured them all perfectly through cinematography, sound design etc.
Most important of all, the film did not shy away from reproducing the homoeroticism of the original. It faithfully shows on screen the erotically charged kisses between Gawain and Bertilak, all 6 of them! The smooching scenes are shot very beautifully, with a dream-like atmosphere, and capture the sexual tension and emotional intensity despite their chastity. And it’s not just about the kisses themselves, which don’t feel gratuitous in a queerbait-y way at all and are incorporated very well into the storyline, the entire sequence where Gawain is in the Hautdesert castle recreates the eroticized dynamic of their agreed game, and the associated imagery of hunting. There are tapestries depicting the chase throughout the castle, and the juxtaposition between the scenes of the Lady trying to seduce Gawain and the disemboweled animals establishes the connection between the hunt outside and the hunt at home. The scene after the second day is my favorite; Lord B comes home with the boar that he killed with his sword, the phallic weapon par excellence, and recounts to Gawain how he drove the sword in to the hilt, a homoerotically charged imagery. The positioning of Gawain within the frame really makes him look like a cornered deer!
Another thing I think the filmmakers did right and I really appreciate is the instability of gender, its presentation through clothing and contrast, and relationship to domesticity. Gawain’s sojourn in the Hautdesert castle is quite feminizing, forcing him into a domesticity more readily associated with ladies. When he first arrives, he is exhausted and famished from riding, and in a demonstration of hypermasculine strength Lord B lifts him up Just Like That, armor and all. He is then stripped of his armor, the marker of conventional and normative masculinity in chivalric romance, and put into (very nice and comely) soft clothes that befit a courtier more than a knight. He becomes squishy again.
If Gawain appears masculine and “normal” in earlier parts of the film where he’s riding around the countryside, he is contrasted with the hypermasculine Lord B, and appears more effeminate in a manner often associated with the “youth” role in homoerotic/sodomitical pairings. This is mentioned by the Green Knight when he first visits Arthur's court, commenting that he sees not men but boys without beards. The filmmakers really nailed it with the casting and styling. Lord B (played by Malcolm Storry) is older, broader and taller, has unruly red hair and beard; Gawain (played by Jason Durr) is younger, slighter in stature, has smooth blond hair groomed into a pretty pageboy haircut. This visual dichotomy reiterates the commonplace man/youth binary in classical depictions of sodomy. If Gawain appears masculine standing next to Lady B who is shorter and conventionally feminine in dress and physique, he appears less so when standing next to Lord B.
The psychosexual vibes are just about right
I noticed that the implied difference in religion is used to gender characters as well. Gawain prays to Mary, calls her “mother mild”, and appears gentle and feminine in his piety; the Green Knight is a creature of sorcery of suspected pagan origin, and one with the inhospitable natural environment around him which lends him a more virile quality. Only when I saw the credits did I learn that the screenplay was by David Rudkin, who also wrote Penda’s Fen (1974) which I saw at a screening at the Barbican last year. It’s all coming together! In the book David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience (1998) by David Ian Rabey, there is a passage of Rudkin talking about his commission for this film. He said that he wanted to tell the story as it was (which he very much did), and the producers chose him specifically for his mythical invocations of pagan England in Penda’s Fen. Both of these works have a vested interest in exploring pre-Christian beliefs and the instability of “canonical” ideas about British history and identity, so it makes sense that this film would also explore the Christian/pagan dichotomy. But it is all defused in the end when the true identity of the Green Knight is revealed. Rabey’s book concludes that this film is “ill served by production and acting resources that have conspicuously failed to define their own attitude to the material”, but that comment is made in relation to the rest of Rudkin’s oeuvre, which I’m not familiar with. In relation to Arthurian cinema, I think it is a very successful and thoughtful interpretation.
This film really understands the centrality of Morgan’s role as the architect of the Green Knight’s game, a homosocial plot to piss off Guinevere. The men are collateral damage and made objects of the women’s entertainment. It’s a distinctly medieval literary depiction of women, not the pure innocent damsels in distress of the 19th century medieval revival but cunning and forward creatures who, in this case, are never punished for doing whatever. Morgan’s centrality does not even need to be spoken aloud; she is never named, but rather eerily lurks around the castle in an if-you-know-you-know fashion, observing Gawain’s trials and tribulations. I think the film is very clever in this, for in watching and being entertained by the film, the viewer is made Morgan’s accomplice. It is a fundamentally different viewing experience to the pornographic male gaze that is often found in commercial fantasy films, where women’s bodies are often contested sites and spectacles. The original poem has Gawain go on what scholars have called a misogynistic diatribe at the end, bemoaning men’s misfortune at the hands of women. But the film deletes this altogether, one of the few alterations to the text, and makes the story much more pleasant and enjoyable.
Men fight and women are entertained
After I watched this film about 3 times I began to wonder how it compared to the other versions. Being the insufferable queer that I am the first thing I wanted to look for was the kissing scenes. I watched the 2021 version and kind of loathed it, the way that film (man)handled the exchange of kisses felt extremely homophobic. It only included a single kiss from the total of six from the poem, and framed it as rather exploitative and non-consensual, and it gives me the feeling that it’s playing upon the assumed straight male viewer’s homophobic fears of violation by another man. I don’t even know what they did to the rest of the story, like at that point you have to ask yourself why are you even making a film bearing this title if you just deleted a significant chunk of the poem, why not just make an original story? I looked up some clips on Youtube and saw people being surprised in the comment section that the kisses were there to begin with; why are they surprised they’re in the original poem?? In contrast to whatever this is, the 1991 version is all the more remarkable because it, like the poem, portrays a Gawain who is actually receptive to the kinky shenanigans proposed by Lord B and willingly returns what he has won from Lady B without fear or disgust. The only thing he withholds is the supposedly enchanted sash which he keeps to save his life, not the romantic/sexual favors, and he is readily forgiven for that as he is in the poem. If we see the game of kisses as a trial of character, I must report that this version failed in concealing to their audiences the truth of the exchange, a failure which warrants a decapitation by the text’s logic.
I think it really is the curse of the genre that people go into any vaguely Arthurian/medieval fantasy film expecting either unintellectual sword and sorcery or grimdark game of thrones epic, not introspective arthouse. It’s not that I dislike goofy unserious adventure stories, but the “genre”, if it can even be called that, can be so much more than that. I don’t even agree with the idea that a medieval/medieval fantasy setting alone is enough to justify the existence of a “genre”; Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Frankenstein (1818) are not the same genre, even though they both have a Regency setting and are written around the same time. The collapsing of all medieval materials into one homogenous mass is woeful to behold, and hampers the public’s enjoyment of well made films like this because people keep comparing it to Monty Python and finding it wanting. The only “serious” arthouse attempt at Arthurian cinema that I have watched is Robert Bresson’s 1974 Lancelot du Lac, centering the heterosexual adultery dynamic, which obviously means it cannot be a good movie because heterosexual romance cannot make high art (my inversion of the homophobic criticism received by E.M. Forster’s Maurice). There is also Eric Rohmer’s 1978 Perceval le Gallois, but personally I don’t care for Perceval so I never bothered.
Some reviews of the 1991 Gawain on IMDB compared it with another adaptation Sword of the Valiant, which looks like it is not so faithful to the original poem but is whacky and has heterosexuality so it must be enjoyable to some people I guess. If this 80s version is cringe hetero sword and sorcery that doesn’t take itself or the poem seriously, the 2021 version almost takes itself too seriously. I personally really don’t care for big productions and epicness, and that film adds a copious amount of straight sex for no discernible reason. It’s almost as if the producers thought that the secret to spiritual maturity is rampant gratuitous heterosexual sex, which says more about their erroneous beliefs on what a normal developed human being is than the intellectual merit of the original poem.
In general I really appreciate films with a medieval/medieval fantasy setting that don’t fetishize epic battle scenes or dark political intrigue and instead attempt an intelligent examination of interpersonal dynamics, especially regarding queerness and gender which are altogether too rare in these parts. The makers of the 1991 Gawain must have put a lot of work into understanding and interpreting the source material, more impressive considering that much of the literature discussing the text’s queerness surfaced in the years after its production. It is an attention and, honestly, radical edge which is missing from the other adaptations of the story and which makes it special. The run-of-the-mill heterosexist filmmaker would not have paid any heed to the source material’s queer themes to begin with.
Side note: the horse they cast for Gringolet in the 1991 version is super cute?? They even nailed this part
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