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Rating:
Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's Lost in La Mancha is a moderately engaging account of iconoclastic director Terry Gilliam's misbegotten attempt to film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, an adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes' classic novel. Like Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse and Les Blank's Burden of Dreams, Lost in La Mancha shows how a filmmaker's own obsessions can bring about disaster. Unlike those films, Lost in La Mancha is not brilliant filmmaking, and it doesn't stand nearly as well on its own, which is problematic. To begin with, the disasters that befall Gilliam's set aren't particularly dramatic. There's the illness of his leading man, Jean Rochefort, and a badly trained horse that doesn't follow Gilliam's direction as he tries to shoot a scene to impress a group of investors. The most dramatic setback is a particularly violent hailstorm that temporarily decimates the film's desert set. It's also interesting to watch some of the internal conflicts, as Gilliam tries to protect his embattled assistant director, Phil Patterson, who doesn't seem particularly eager to continue with the shoot. As a companion piece to a film that doesn't exist, this is pretty interesting stuff, but as a finished product, in and of itself, it's nothing special. The few teasing glimpses of Gilliam's unfinished film that Fulton and Pepe provide make one hope that some day, Lost in La Mancha will take its rightful place beside its subject on some kind of deluxe DVD package. Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

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