"The tempo of the revolution is that of scandal and publicity."-Grigori Kozintsev "Deeds of heroism will change the world."-Don Quixote Don Quixote is a comic epic in a serious mode: Kozintsev's interpretation of Cervantes strips the novel down to its spirit and color, like a painting whose richness lies in the quality of the paint itself. Kozintsev is above all an actor's director-for the right actor, one willing to take risks. Nikolai Cherkasov (Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible), who had played the Knight of the Woeful Countenance in stage, opera, and ballet versions of the novel, makes himself a figure from El Greco, but his interpretation is not only physical. Precisely by being true to himself, by avoiding theatrics and psychologisms, his Don Quixote incorporates the director's vision of "a good man who wanted to establish social justice on earth?in an age when justice could only appear as an object of ridicule." This self-reflexive character takes fiction to be thegospel truth, and in a society imprisoned by boredom his delusions are infectious, but he's nobody's fool. Indeed, Kozintsev and Co. have found in Cervantes the absurd quality of the Eastern European cinema-Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (played as salt-of-the-earth by Yuri Tolubeyev), amid the nobility, file their report on the party and the guests.