There’s a neat little moment in A Knight’s Tale that I like to think speaks directly to how it became one of my favourite films. Having riled up the crowd before Heath Ledger’s imposter knight William rides into a joust, Paul Bettany’s boisterous Geoffrey Chaucer tells him: “I got their attention. You go and win their hearts.”
Brian Helgeland’s 2001 film is on paper absurd. It’s a medieval sports movie about jousting, filmed on cheapo sets in post-Velvet revolution Prague to an arena-rock soundtrack, which begins with peasants walloping wooden stands to Queen’s We Will Rock You. Peter Bradshaw wrote in his review at the time: “Is the film based on a dream he had after eating far too much cheese?” Its leading lady, Shannyn Sossamon, her hair crimped into spiky halos, was scooped up into the cast from DJing Gwyneth Paltrow’s birthday party. Ledger is always wearing chaps. Is it authentic? Probably not! But A Knight’s Tale is a film so full of heart it’s the only thing that’ll do when I need to watch something uncomplicatedly lovely.
The film follows William Thatcher, a squire to a knight found dead in a ditch minutes before he’s due in the arena for a jousting tournament. It’s the 1370s, and only people of noble birth can compete – but William convinces his fellow squires, the sensible Roland (Mark Addy) and the volatile Wat (Alan Tudyk) that he should take their dead master’s place.
William wins the joust and persuades Wat and Roland to keep up the ruse, sure in his conviction that “a man can change his stars”. With the help of Bettany’s Chaucer, nakedly trudging through the countryside having gambled away all his clothes, William becomes the fake knight Sir Ulrich von Liechtenstein, and jousts his way to the World Championships. A dream and a deception provide the narrative impetus, but there’s a damsel too, in the shape of Jocelyn (Sossamon), a noblewoman in papal white felt who William courts in a cathedral. But Count Adhemar, played with consummate dastardliness by Rufus Sewell, his jet-black curls the counterpoint to William’s gold, also wants Jocelyn – and he’s the knight to beat in the ring.
The sunny Ledger as the underdog in lousy armour is of course the movie’s star, but much of my fondness for it stems from the ensemble cast: the almost motherly Roland making a tunic out of a tent; Wat, explosively threatening to “fong” anyone who crosses him; Bettany’s high-low “Geoff” Chaucer; and Kate, the triple-threat blacksmith who makes new Nike-branded armour for William, teaches him a farandole and knocks the other three out of the park in a post-credits farting contest. In one of the film’s sweetest scenes, the four of them string the pieces of their broken hearts together to write a love letter to Jocelyn in William’s (or rather Ulrich’s) name.
To me, watching a feelgood film is an intensely nostalgic exercise. That’s because whenever a film is special or timely enough to take up lodging in your heart, rewatching it is also an act of remembering an old version of yourself. A Knight’s Tale is shaded by the genuine sadness of Ledger’s death only seven years after its release, but when I watch it I also remember the way it used to make me feel, as a girl who loved the jousting because her older brother did, all the while secretly cherishing an action film for being so brazenly sentimental.
For halfway through A Knight’s Tale, the stakes of the competition are rewritten as William’s quest to the top is turned upside down by Jocelyn. She insists that if he loves her, he will lose the tournament in her name. He sets about doing precisely that, in a montage of showering splinters as he’s smacked with lance after lance. Jocelyn then decides that actually, William shouldn’t lose, he should win. She forces him to strip obsession, status and ego from his pursuit of sporting victory and replaces them with romance.
And I haven’t even mentioned the dance scene! This warm sunbeam of a scene is the best in the film – maybe of any film, ever. At a post-tournament ball, William is asked to demonstrate a “typical” dance from his made-up home of Gelderland. The dinky lutes begin to weave in the notes of David Bowie’s Golden Years, and the staid court dance dissolves into a hedonic disco whirl. William and Jocelyn swirl and leap around and punch the air, young and beautiful as they perform maybe the dumbest dance moves ever. It’s silly and sexy and completely joyful and I just love it. Or to paraphrase “Geoff” Chaucer: it grabs my attention and it wins my heart.
A Knight’s Tale is available on Amazon Prime in the US and available to rent digitally in the UK