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Rating:
Let me explain Tarantino to you. The greatest film by Tarantino. Greater than Pulp Fiction, greater than Inglourious Basterds and Kill Bill. Perhaps not more entertaining, not more enjoyable. But this is the filmmaker's testament, he has nothing more to say because here he says it all. He destroys cinema and rebuilds it, annihilates history and reality, falsifies it, explaining that the vibrations that move cinema cannot start only from cinema: they are outside, in life and reality. And he says this as someone who eats film reels for breakfast, who weaves, never more than in this case, his works of increasingly convoluted and distorting citations and self-citations. But there is authenticity and heart even in a fixed shot of a car racing through Los Angeles, and there is hypocrisy and shallowness in so much, so much pseudo-cinema. The kind made of dyed jackets and fake mustaches, which are important but cannot be the stopping point. A kaleidoscope of concepts and images on the brink of madness, intertwined in a fierce, almost deliberately incomprehensible way. Because here the director is making a film for himself, it is his legacy. The viewer must adapt, indeed: the viewer, like the world of Hollywood, is one of the polemical targets.
Nothing Happens
It's unsettling. End of the first act, the lights come on in the theater and I look at my friend's face: “Damn, we're halfway through and nothing has happened yet.” I said it, I fell for it. Then I understood, but I'm sure for many (many, given the box office success) it will remain a film where almost nothing happens. This is because the discourse becomes particularly intellectual here, it's the first work by QT that cannot be understood except through an intellectual lens. Be aware, all his films were, from Reservoir Dogs, but all the meta-discourses were disguised by the strong genre component, which distracted the viewer. He has always deconstructed the genres he tackled, but for the viewer, those remained genre films because there was no critical capacity, or necessity, to realize that Reservoir Dogs is a heist movie without the heist, Pulp Fiction is a gangster movie without a gangster scene, that Inglourious Basterds rewrites the rules of war films (a war film without the war, even that), that Django is a film about racism that disarms the rhetoric of racism, that Kill Bill is a smoothie of genres that transcends the rules of each, surpassing them all in humanistic terms. His skill is such that it pushes the concepts into the background. But they have always been there.
The meta-cinematic genre is too intellectual and niche (but far from secondary, from Day for Night to Hail, Caesar!) to be appealing to generalist tastes. But that’s what this is. A film about making films, made by someone who, like few others, knows how to make films by quoting other films. And despite the most banal expectations, it is not an ode to cinema, far from it. Tarantino has never been so sharp, ruthless, cynical.
This Is How Cinema Dies
In his childhood dreams on the streets of Los Angeles (this is what the long car sequences with songs upon songs are), the germ of inauthenticity insinuates itself. It talks about how cinema dies here, beyond and before how it is reborn. Cinema dies with guys like Rick Dalton, or producer Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino), it dies with directors who have in mind the mustache and hat to slap on their villain of the moment, but never dream of building emotions from their scenes. This Hollywood is already dead at this point in time. There are spaghetti westerns in Italy, but Rick is so obtuse that he doesn't want to go to Italy at all.
The discourse is not merely philological and historical. It holds equal value today. It is a programmatic discourse that says: by doing it this way, cinema dies. There is no authenticity, there is a lot of vanity: a real vibration is needed, from the actor as a human being and not as a character, to shake up cinema. Rick, to give meaning to his umpteenth villain, must meet the purity of an eight-year-old actress, must make mistakes and find himself in complete embarrassment, to realize his human degradation. He has a moment of pride and delivers a worthy performance before the final collapse. The actor is the man.
Where Is the Cinema
Cliff Booth seems like the unlucky friend, the stuntman who becomes the driver and handyman for the fallen star Dalton. He is the real hero in this meta-cine scenario. He is the hero because he doesn't make cinema, he is cinema (like the Superman discourse in Kill Bill). And his misadventures are mini films within the film (in a film that presents infinite windows of second-level narrative, this is the first level, in truth, a mosaic of mini cinematic essays). Cliff quarrels with Bruce Lee, let's go with martial arts, Cliff takes Pussycat (hairy armpits) to the hippie ranch, and I make a quarter-hour thriller-mystery, pretentious and with a comedic ending. Cliff takes acid, and there’s the perfect surreal splatter with a dog to boot.
The director who chews celluloid, in his ninth (and perhaps last) film, tells us two things: that the soul of cinema is in realities, it is the real that creates cinema, and this art cannot simply self-sustain. The gaze must always extend outward because even the smallest misadventures of a stuntman have their, even ample, cinematic moment. A mere inspiration, an element is enough, then it is the style, the director's brush that builds the entire corollary. And in the sequence at the ranch, we have a masterclass on how to create tension, regardless of the real weight of a fact.
Style and Experience
Basically, it reprimands the self-referential cinema, which feeds merely on genres and appearances. It demands a fresh vision, beyond, in the world, but which is artistically in tune. One must know how to make cinema, it is a grammar that must be possessed, without technique there is no good art. Then, it doesn't matter if you tell me about stoners or Hitler, Bruce Lee or Pai Mei. Style is everything, but it must apply to an authentic vision, to real experience, to a rich feeling and not just a mere repetition within the tracks of a genre. Ultimately, Quentin wants to tell us that he has lived cinema; it is a thrill of real life, not cold speculation. His ultra-citationism is never a tired repetition of clichés; it's an experience that declines into art.
The emotion of Rick Dalton, his outburst against himself, is what gives him the rage to pull off a worthy scene. It's not the script, not the mustaches, not the meticulous study of the lines. Improvise too, but be authentic.
God with a Camera
The scene at the saloon is splendid where moments of acting and others of commentary alternate without cuts, when Rick forgets his lines and swears. Without directorial cuts, the result is disorienting, because you can't see the difference, the shot doesn’t change. The viewer is left hanging. It’s one of the many games between style and narrative that he proposes subtly. To signal the omnipotence of direction and style. In a similar yet opposite way, he decides to insert abrupt cuts during a moment of pause on set, when Rick is chatting with a colleague. The abrupt cuts are perceived by the viewer, who senses the forced nature but can't explain it and assumes that this too is a film within the film. But it's simply a provocation.
God with a camera plays with the mouse in the room. When he inserts long unintroduced flashbacks, which seem like simple alternating montages. Without indications, the poor viewer is lost.
Reality and Fiction, Pulverized
As he is lost in the swirl of tiles that brutally bring - images from archives, others that recreate existing films, others that invent plausible films for the time, or wittily cite other Tarantino films (“Kill the dirty Nazi bastards!”). The kaleidoscope should not be deciphered, but one should surrender to it. Because in doing so, you enter QT's head, like a stream of consciousness that has no interest in distinguishing between cinema and life, because life is cinema and cinema is life.
Similarly, distinctions between the chronicle of real events and the director's sly variations should not be critically analyzed. It is not Inglourious Basterds, where reality and fiction are well-distinguished as in a historical novel. Here it becomes impossible and pointless to verify everything unless you want to write a dissertation on it. But the message is another: we are well beyond the challenge of 2009. Here the director builds and dismantles, hybrids everything, disorients the viewer and deceives them, mocks them, compels them to stop trying to distinguish between true and plausible or even hyperbolically invented. [Spoiler] The final gamble, the greatest mockery, is to remove from the narrative the (hypothetical) heart of his film. A work on the Polanski household massacre without the massacre. Viewer, surrender, I am stronger than you!
Sharon Tate comes off almost as a fool. She is the cinema that masturbates on itself, looking at itself to see itself splendid and to enjoy the public's applause once more. This is the Tate in the theater. A perverse machine that has nothing artistic about it.
Getting Excited
The viewer does not understand this film. They love Tarantino for the wrong reasons. And Tarantino massacres them. Because I can't define the two feet scenes any differently. Leave QT's perversions to him, don’t get involved... But now his myth precedes him, and so what does he do? He throws crap at you. The dirty feet of Sharon Tate are this, as are those deformed by the glass of the spectacular Pussycat.
Never has he dialogued so irreverently with expectations and with himself (“Kill the dirty Nazi bastards”). This is a Tarantino speaking as a post-Tarantino. By now, he too is a cliché, a genre, a product to bargain with. But he doesn't agree: “Screw you all. Now I'll show you. Come on, two hours of film without a drop of blood. Do you like feet? Here they are, nice and dirty. Are you good at picking up my citations? Now I will make your life impossible.”
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood encapsulates everything that is (was) Tarantino and surpasses it, mocks it. It could be his last film, perhaps it should be.
An Aside: The Dialogues
I won't bore you with the actors' skill, the music (perhaps too much of it, but here it's all a trip). But yes, on the dialogues, I will. Aren't they always at the top? It doesn't matter. This is not cinema of dialogues; it doesn't matter what is said. It's all image, aesthetics, and reflections subtly suggested. It's not a film about something; it is a film that speaks about itself.
9.5/10
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