The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Ermanno Olmi, 1988)

by Elena Lazic

Something that has been occupying my mind a lot lately is the concept of fantasy. I don’t mean the literary genre, but the imaginary world that we sometimes find ourselves spending more time in than reality. I think that many of us often live in a fantasy — at least I do — but I haven’t seen a lot of films acknowledge it. This shortage makes sense: it is much easier to write stories where people find themselves in a real situation, which they then act on and change on a straightforward cause-and-effect basis. Characters in such down-to-earth stories may have desires, and thus long to be in a situation which isn’t (yet) a reality, but that is very different from living in a fantasy and feeling as though the ideal imagined situation is real. While desire highlights a lack and can therefore push us forward to change our circumstances, fantasy is a refuge that does not encourage action and where, on the contrary, one pretends to live in a world in which one has no wishes or desires, because those have all already been granted and fulfilled. 

Ermanno Olmi’s The Legend of the Holy Drinker centres on a homeless man, Andreas (Rutger Hauer), with a very rich fantasy life, mostly filled with memories of better days, who tunes out of reality by drinking. This premise makes it sound like one of those dubious films which romanticise homelessness and more or less openly suggest that a poor man can find suitable refuge in his imagination. But Olmi isn’t so much interested in the tragic contrast between fantasy and reality, as he is in the coexistence of the two, and the moment when they meet.