St George and the dragon

Fuente of Paolo Uccello’s Saint George and the Dragon

I just saw a wonderful movie on Film and Arts that was new to me: The Ebony Tower with Laurence Olivier, Roger Ress, Greta Scacchi and Toya Willcox.

Olivier is an aging painter, Breasley. I must admit I sympathized more with his character than I did with Ress’, in which he assumes the personage of a younger artist and art critic called David. The young man visits the old one at his country house somewhere in France. I won’t go into the inevitable romance because the interesting part of the film was the encounter and contrast between Breasley, a figurative artist and the much younger and abstract painter David.

Breasley is totally non-intellectual, and his work seems to flow from the French-Celtic woods he chooses to live in with his two young nymph-muses. The movie representations of his work were in fact interesting. I didn’t recognize them, but they may have really been pieces taken from someone’s work. (It didn’t occur to me to check for that in the final credits.) David cannot understand Breasley; he even prudishly disapproves of his rakish fantasy life.

I had the feeling I should have sided with David, but I couldn’t. I rather understood Breasley’s sarcastic comparison of his house guest with Uccello’s St George where the knight seems to charge courageously at the princess’ over-large house-pet that she holds on a leash. His attempts at “liberating” her become ridiculous. The dragon is, of course, Breasley and the supposedly enslaved princess is Diana, one of the girls who accompanies the old man.