IT'S NOT THAT EASY BEATING GREEN

Opening this weekend:

The Green Knight--A huge green guy on a horse crashes King Arthur's Christmas Party, inviting any of Arthur's knights to strike him in return for his formidable green battle axe. The condition: one year hence, the assailant must show up at the Green Knight's place and allow him to return a blow of the same severity. Most of the Knights of the Round Table wisely take a pass; the ambitious young Gawain agrees and beheads the intruder, who promptly rises, picks up his own severed noggin, and tells Gawain see you next Christmas.

This, as you may recall from English class, is the set-up for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the anonymous 14th-Century Arthurian poem. It's been filmed at least twice before, including as the kitschy Sword of the Valiant in 1984, with Miles O'Keeffe and Sean Connery as Gawain and Greenie, respectively.

This new adaptation, by the American writer-director David Lowery, tries a more idiosyncratic approach. The story unfolds in an austere medieval look and atmosphere, with the characters skulking around really cold and inhospitable-looking castles, or desolate forests. The stylized imagery often recalls Old Masters religious art; Dev Patel, who plays Gawain, here looks like he stepped out of a Last Supper mural.

And yet the people are entirely and unromantically human. Patel plays Gawain as a typical young man with proximity to power but no real position: not a bad sort, but vain, petulant, reckless, horny and a little entitled (his Mom, played by Sarita Choudhury, is Arthur's sister Morgan Le Fay). Sean Harris plays Arthur with a thick, bumpkin-ish accent (he calls our hero "GAR-win"), and his Guinevere (Kate Dickie) looks like she's escaped from a cautionary TV spot about the dangers of smoking.

Lowery seems to want to show how honoring one's word under all-but-impossible circumstances--like, say, not only submitting to having your head cut off, but undergoing an arduous and dangerous journey to do it--happens in the real world of ordinary people with ordinary motivations, rather than in the idealized world of chivalric romance. It's a daring idea, but the result is a deeply eccentric, borderline campy movie unlikely to please either medieval classicists or fans of the Tolkien and Outlander flicks and Boorman's Excalibur. For one thing, there isn't one decent sword fight in the film; this Gawain is decidedly a lover, not a fighter.

But patient, open-minded viewers will know they've seen something at the end of this slow, exasperatingly fussy movie. Don't misunderstand; it's a challenge, but it's also visually beautiful; it's full of many odd, effective little episodes, like Gawain's encounter with St. Winifred (Erin Kellyman); and the actors generate a surprising degree of eroticism. Lowery's style recalls earlier movies ranging from Rohmer's 1978 Perceval le Gallois to the Peter Greenaway films to Scorcese's The Last Temptation of Christ, and even Rene Laloux's Fantastic Planet. But it isn't quite an imitation of any of them.

The movie that The Green Knight most recalls, however, inevitably and unfortunately, is Monty Python and the Holy Grail. As Gawain trudged through mist-shrouded woods, I kept waiting for The Knights Who Say "Ni" to show up. I would have been glad to see them, too.