Quicunque

To have carved on the days of our vanity
A sun
A ship
A star
A cornstalk

Also a few marks
From an ancient forgotten time
A child may read

That not far from the stone
A well
Might open for wayfarers

Here is a work for poets -
Carve the runes
Then be content with silence.


George Mackay Brown, 1996

I watched Alatriste this evening - and for its entire duration of two-and-a-half hours I marvelled how much the lead looked exactly like Viggo Mortensen (for whom I do carry a wee bit of a crush). As the credits rolled, I realised it WAS Viggo Mortensen. Epic fail! I badly need new glasses, How could I be so thick? My only excuse is that my attention must have wandered as much as the plot.

Moving on....

The film was visually superb, bringing to vivid life the squalor and the splendour of the times, and the plentiful fight scenes are authentically brutal in a way that Hollywood never dares manage. But plot-wise, it was a fragmented mess, mainly through having tried to condense episodes from five novels into one film. However, the characters and the of the period (Hapsburg Spain) were fascinating enough to make me curious about the actual novels by Arturo Pérez-Revete. I read his The Fencing Master several years ago and remember it as an interesting and elegant historical thriller - an Alexandre Dumas for the modern age.

Talking of Dumas, it's interesting to compare Alatriste's brutal moral ambiguity with the Three Musketeers' relatively merry swashbuckling. Alatriste is a better hero for our times than d'Artagnan, I think, we prefer the anti-hero nowadays.