Rocinante

At the start of this portrait of England as 'a garden of secrets, full of tradition and myth, violence and cover-up', Hurt hides away from reality in a derelict cinema (geddit?), until a conversation about narrative with the ex-projectionist (Jewel) forces him to take to the road aboard a truck named Rocinante. The allusion to Quixote's horse (and thus, presumably, to Cervantes' wittily wayward storytelling) is misleading: during the ideologically unconscious Hurt's aimless odyssey to Dartmoor, his main encounter is with Jess (Douglass), a political activist scarred by the '84 miners' strike and intent on industrial sabotage. Meanwhile, 'jester' Dury pops up to spout poetry and make ironic comment. Despite the film's good intentions, it is, quite simply, appalling. Such bourgeois conventions as plausible, pacy narrative, realist characterisation, and the potential for an audience's emotional involvement, are jettisoned in favour of stilted, 'significant' dialogue, banal parallels with myth, and clumsily contrived symbolism. The result is a mess: dry, humourless, half-baked obscurantism that insults the viewer.