Quentin Tarantino
C'era una volta... A Hollywood

"Once upon a time there was a freaking Rick Dalton who torched stoned hippies and murderers near Polanski's house in... Hollywood," this was meant to be the title of Quentin Tarantino's latest film.

The Ninth Tarantino Film.

A symphony of electric colors and liquefied death, a melancholic and criminal elegy written in a countryside cemetery illuminated by the signs of a damned Hollywood in the stabbed heart of the Empire, a ghostly whirlwind of images drowned in a bucket of though diluted lysergic acid, like the first and only quarter of LSD I have ever taken in my life.

I have the DVD. Found by chance, in a newsstand, buried among yellowed magazines, crumpled inserts, and Amos Oz novels that no one will ever buy.

It was four in the morning and the third viewing in a row when, just before the Batman theme started descending, I pressed the "eject" button, letting the dust-covered DVD player spit out the wobbly gray disc.

I couldn't make it.

I wanted to cry, like when you're too emotional and fling open the window to get as much fresh air as possible. I cried during the poignant epilogue of The Godfather - Part Three, after the agony caused by the paradisiacal and exhausting advance of the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana that accompanies the Corleone funeral ceremony. Tears streaked down my cheeks for 1900, dripped slow and relentless for The Deer Hunter and for Kill Bill 2: never wound what you cannot kill. I didn't cry for Scorsese, with The Irishman, but I know I will when I watch it again. Because this is cinema. This is the seventh art. In the dark, far from everything, I find myself riding with the inventiveness of a child the frames rolling in front of the awed gaze of a boy who, by now, no longer believes in anything.

Poetry will save me...

I would have screamed, a few hours ago, in the night fogged by a thick and cruel mist, I would have liked to shout, like a madman, then run under the clear sprouting of Selene, and cry. Cry like a jerk. Ah, if the rain had washed away my tears... An endless rain, but clear. Clean. Beautiful. Damn.

Tarantino's work, is poetry. Pure.

He lives on the same lifeblood as Whitman, Hemingway, Joyce, Salinger, Faulkner, Chandler, Bukowsky; his film lies beside Eliot's The Waste Land, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Shakespeare's The Tempest. Pulp Fiction, Scarface, Goodfellas, and Inglourious Basterds nestled between No Beast So Fierce and Naked Lunch.

"In this town, anything can change in an instant," exclaims an excited Rick Dalton in the film's trailer.

Yes, everything has changed. And I am sure that the gate creaking open at the end of the film is the gate to paradise. Because the slaughter has happened. The massacre, completed. Hollywood, and with it the American dream, ended in blood. No psychedelic trip will ever change destiny. Not even in cinematic fiction. The closing music is sadly reminiscent of Rosemary’s Baby, and Rick Dalton, Cliff Booth, Sharon Tate, and the others are all dead.

The squaring of the circle. Everything is dying.

The grinder that spit Rick Dalton back out was built specifically to exploit as fully as possible the sensation of claustrophobia and disorientation among individuals - a perception due to the crisis of community concept - and use it for one sole purpose: the accumulation of capital.

Living as an ordinary citizen a stone’s throw from Hollywood means being in contact with enchanting and monstrous celebrities, sharing one’s existence with the blinding perjured glory of a sealed and inaccessible multibillion-dollar apparatus, an immense and shadowy Moloch that casts its dark shadow over the entire city, a fat and deformed, hazy and torpid leviathan forcing the weary and exacerbated masses to confront their iniquity day after day. Hour after hour. Triggering a death match that ends up involving everyone.

- "Are you an actor?"
- "I'm a stuntman..."
- "Even better..."
- "Yeah? Why?"
- "Actors are fake..."

I feel like making the same speech as in The Irishman, with which I believe Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood has much in common. Even in this film, the authorities come out in pieces. Let’s think of Cliff Booth and his wild brazenness. He is the true protagonist of this strange and stunning Los Angelian tale: “damned” war hero, stuntman destroyer of women and party crasher, an ex-soldier now outlaw, handsomely maddening and rough as the sandpaper that refinishes the bodywork of those rusty and dented convertibles he drives on the sun-scorched California asphalt. A cowboy of our times.

Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio are as beautiful as the landscape surrounding them.

The reproduction of a time now distant as a dream is as fabulous and astonishing as a director could hope to achieve. Tarantino performs the miracle of creating not only the Hollywood of those days but 1969 itself. His refined and sophisticated universe finds fulfillment in the cheap aesthetics of wind-blown palms, among the creases of the asphalt and the makeshift-edged billboards.

In the theater, the ears of the audience lie on the colorless and scratched velvet of the radio background. The cars are those that raged at the threshold of the '70s. The roar of engines explodes in accelerations and can be heard in the contaminated trills of pauses at traffic lights. They are alive. Lived-in luxury Cadillacs, Porsches frozen in their moment of utmost splendor, MG, Dodge, Volkswagen, and Mustang neck-stretched.

And we, for two hours and thirty-five minutes, drove those cars, sipped those cocktails, smoked those cigarettes, watched those films and TV series, met those hitchhikers... lived that dream.

Yes, we were there too.

Thank you for everything, Quentin. From the bottom of my heart.